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Directing duo Adil & Billal bounce back with a wartime musical tragedy.
This should have been a banner year for Ms. Marvel directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah. That is until the widely publicised cancellation of Batgirl briefly grounded the high-flying filmmakers. But the pair are ending 2022 back on top with Rebel. Shot between blockbuster superhero projects, it’s the story of a Brussels-based Muslim family whose lives are torn apart by the war in Syria.
“It’s our most personal movie,” says El Arbi, talking to Teasers at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, months before their Batgirl woes. “We’re Moroccans, we’re Arabs, we’re North Africans.”
Describing Syria as “the war of their generation”, El Arbi and Fallah grew up watching friends and neighbours travel to the country to fight for those suffering under the Assad regime, only to be radicalised by even more insidious forces. “It was extremely important for us to tell this story, and understand why everything happened,” Fallah explains.
After starting work in 2013, the story evolved over the years as Islamic State took on increased prominence and notoriety on the world stage. The
resulting film tracks the radicalisation of 10-year-old Nassim (Amir El Arbi, younger sibling of Adil) after his older brother Kamal (Aboubakr Bensaihi) is reluctantly recruited as a cameraman by IS forces during a humanitarian mission in the Syrian war zone.
Crucially, El Arbi and Fallah wanted to portray IS not as righteous religious warriors, but the gangsters they are. “They really operate like organised crime,” El Arbi says. “They’re very bureaucratic. They’re very money-minded. We always felt that they used religion as a pretext for the criminal organisation.”
Scorsese was a key inspiration. As was Oliver Stone, the pair describing
Rebel as “their Platoon”. With the blockbuster action of Bad Boys For Life on their CV, El Arbi and Fallah came equipped to realise some chaotic battle scenes, shot with Saving Private Ryan levels of in-the-moment intensity. “We chose to stay with our main character, because in those propaganda videos, you actually never see the enemy,” El Arbi explains. “When we were shooting that sequence, I had the feeling that I was in a war,” Fallah adds, with a nervous chuckle.
A wildly ambitious genre mishmash, Rebel is also a musical tragedy, and features several strikingly staged, surrealist dance sequences that visualise the characters’ emotional state – a device that doubled as an act of defiance. “For IS music is haram, it’s forbidden. That was an extremely important reason for us to then also tell it as a musical,” Fallah says. “It’s to show that, yes, there is this thing called terrorism and Islamic radicalism that we have heard so much about,” adds El Arbi, “but Arab and Muslim
culture is much richer than that.”
‘It was extremely important for us to tell this story, and understand why everything happened’ BILALL FALLAH