Ladj Ly

[press conference for Les misérables (2019) at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival] The starting point of course of this project was a police blunder that I filmed ten years ago. For five years, I filmed scenes in my neighbourhood - we filmed the cops - it was a neighbourhood where a lot of things happened and I started to film the cops and then I actually filmed a cop blunder, and I had a video therefore. We talked with our collective group and we decided to disseminate the video. After a police enquiry, the press latched onto the video and the policeman was suspended. A few years later I decided to turn it into Les misérables (2017), which was my first short film. I'd been wanting for quite some time to do a short - for about ten years I'd been thinking of the idea. It's quite complicated to do a feature film of course, it wasn't an easy matter, we had a very small budget but we did manage to do it. So that was the starting point; I started by making a short and as it was so very successful - we were selected for any number of festivals and got about 30 awards - so I felt that the time was right to do my first feature film which bears the same name, Les Misérables. Show less «