Laurent Heynemann
in Hommage à Léo Matarasso, Séminaire sur le droit des peuples, Cahier réalisé par CEDETIM-LIDLP-CEDIDELP, Février 1999
During the writing of the screenplay, out of a youthful fear of suffocating my creative faculties with too much information, I had only met two living witnesses of this affair, Henri Alleg of course, the tortured activist, the author of the book that awakened people’s consciences during the Algerian war, and then one of his lawyers: Léo Matarasso.
Léo told me about his visits to Algiers, threatened with death by activists, protected by the president of the Algiers bar in the name of professional solidarity. He told me about his visits to Barberousse prison, Henri passing him, clandestinely, leaf by leaf, folded and hidden in his belt or in his shoe, the book, this book that has marked my life as a man and as a filmmaker.
That evening in 1976, Léo was a spectator.
On the screen, there is the film… And François Lalande playing his part. The memory I have of this screening where these two men – Alleg and Matarasso who risked their lives for their ideas, but also for an idea they had of the world, for a fight they had chosen – these two men watching my film, even today, still stirs me with emotion.
François Lalande is a comedy actor, a funny guy, who plays the role with fantasy and a certain discrepancy with the seriousness of the character… I see, two rows in front of me, in the false darkness of this projection room, Léo Matarasso enjoying his humour. I also see him smiling and, furtively, recognizing himself in a fiction that has telescoped dates, voluntarily confused events, synthesized lives.
At the end of the film, he complimented me, stayed with me for a while, and congratulated me for not having hesitated to give the lawyer character a slightly amusing vision. Because these people, those who have risked their lives to defend justice, also defend a light-hearted idea of heroism, a non-pathetic vision of their struggles.
The company of these two men, their taste for distance, but also the stubborn dimension of their certainties, beset by the doubt that the humanism of their culture distils in them, their humour and their tenderness have also led the film towards a less heavy, less didactic, less Manichean vision of cinema with a political subject.
May they be forever thanked!
Heynemann, Laurent