Ismaël Ferroukhi

Ismael Ferroukhi made history with his debut feature, "Le Grand voyage," the first fictional film to be allowed to shoot in Mecca during the Hajj pilgrimage. Considering the clash between ancestral and acquired cultures, the often droll drama reflected Ferroukhi's own experience as a Moroccan raised in France, which he first explored in the 1992 short "L'Exposé," which focused on a boy preparing a class talk on his homeland. Having won the Kodak Prize at Cannes, Ferroukhi worked as screenwriter with director friend Cédric Kahn to expand their contribution to the TV series "Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge" into the teenage rite of passage "Trop de Bonheur." They would reunite for the teleplay "Culpabilité zéro" and the feature "L'Avion," in which a twentysomething and an eight year-old respectively come to terms with the loss of a friend and a father. But, by then, Ferroukhi's directing career had taken off with the shorts "L'Inconnu" (in which lonely Catherine Deneuve befriends homeless Miki Manojlovic) and "La Paire de chaussures" (which recreated an incident from the childhood of director Jean Renoir) and the TV-movies "Un Été aux hirondelles" (about a slacker reconsidering his Muslim faith) and "Petit Ben," in which a Beur thief's life changes while taking care of his infant son. Further acclaimed for the father-son road movie "Le Grand voyage" in 2004, Ferroukhi has since completed "Free Men," which centres on the friendship between an Algerian resistance fighter and a Jew in Second World War Paris.