Ismaël Ferroukhi is the first filmmaker to shoot a fiction film at Mecca's Great Mosque. Sheena Sweeney talks to him about his acclaimed low-budget father-son story Le Grand Voyage.

'I try to work with this and never with this', says the director Ismaël Ferroukhi with a very heavy French accent, as he points first at the general area of his heart and then to his head. 'I can't explain some things, you know? I only try to feel.' His sentences are delivered in uneven bites, with some frustration and constant glances to an interpreter to ensure that he is not talking complete gibberish. Which he never does. Unsurprisingly, Ferroukhi has a gift for communicating, and nowhere is this more evident than in his great debut feature Le Grand Voyage. It is the story of Reda, the son of a Moroccan immigrant from the south of France where his family has lived for many years. When Reda finds himself having to drive his father on a pilgrimage to Mecca, the film explores the filial relationship as well as issues of personal, national, and religious identity.

We are all individuals
According to Ferroukhi everyone faces the same problems with asserting their individuality. But he says it is more pronounced for people of 'exile status; there is a bigger gap when you come from another country, because you have to deal with the problems of language and culture and everything else'. Of the age old difficulties between adult children and their parents Ferroukhi says, 'I know people who converse with their parents, but they never really talk to them. I think it's a kind of competition between the father and son or mother and daughter. To exist, you have to confront, and if you don't, you are secondary to your parents.' One of the most poignant themes in the film, beneath the mutual annoyance of both father and son, is a sense of caution when it comes to really communicating with each other. The idea that it's not okay, as a male, to express emotion, usually because of social conditioning, is sensitively captured by Nicolas Cazalé (as Reda) and Mohamed Majd (as the father) conveying what Ferroukhi calls in French 'pudeur' best rendered in English as emotional shyness.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 107.