‘Salam’ Co-Director Houda Benyamina on the Privilege of Helping Former French Rapper Diam’s Tell Her Own Story

variety.com:

Caitlin Quinlan Premiering as a Special Screening at Cannes was a documentary co-directed by Houda Benyamina, Anne Cissé and subject Melanie Diam’s, the former French rapper and music sensation who stepped away from public life in the early 2010s after converting to Islam. “Salam,” meaning “peace” in Arabic, follows Diam’s new life as a philanthropist and mother, far from the chaos and fame of her past career.Her new religious path in life was met with vast shock and criticism from the French media at the time, and pushed Diam’s further toward the realization that she needed to abandon her music for good.Benyamina was reluctant to share the direction of the film at first because of a need to “have my own projects and my own voice,” she says. “But when Melanie asked me to direct her movie by myself, I told her no.

It’s her story and she needs to re-appropriate her own story. It was very important for me to help her because I feel a sense of solidarity toward her as an artist and what they did to her in France was very violent.

So to give her my tools to help her re-appropriate her story in her own voice was a political act for me.”The film takes a firm stance in favoring the present over the past.

No footage of Diam’s performance career appears in the film and the only insights into her troubled history with depression and mental health issues come via personal testimony. “The past doesn’t exist,” says Benyamina. “Today is the present and Melanie wants to live in the present moment.