JEAN-BERNARD MARLIN
Jean-Bernard Marlin grew up in Marseilles and then moved to Paris to study. He studied film at the Louis Lumière cinema school and attended a Screenplay Workshop at the Fémis School. In 2007 he directed THICK-SKINNED, a short that was selected and awarded in numerous international film festivals. He directed QUELQUE CHOSE DE FÉROCE (SOMETHING FIERCE), a documentary about a juvenile delinquent, in 2012 and then THE RUNAWAY in 2013, which received the Golden Bear for best short film at the 2013 Berlinale and was nominated for the 2014 Césars. Profoundly interested in acting, Jean-Bernard trained in several different acting methods. Today, he gives drama classes in several schools. SHEHERAZADE, entirely filmed with non-professional actors, is his first feature film.

Director’s statement
The film starting point was a news segment about five years ago, in Marseilles, about a young, small-time pimp. A 16-year-old runaway was arrested in a hotel used by sex workers in the center of town, where he lived with two prostitutes that were the same age as him. For several months they lived off of the prostitution money, so he was charged with living off immoral earnings. As far as these young people were concerned, they were in love. Things were rather violent between them; there was slapping and hitting involved but the young people in question truly identified this as a love story. I’ve seen this kind of story numerous times in the streets of Marseilles. I’ve seen young prostitutes fight and struggle to survive by turning tricks while their boyfriends were hitting hard times. Some of the girls would even bring money to them in prison. […] In order to write this film, I came back to live in the city where I grew up. I spent several months with young women who prostitute themselves in the Rotonde neighborhood, which is where the actual story took place. They’re 16 to 24 years old and hang around in groups. They live in nearby hotel rooms. I observed their lives on the street, I asked them to tell me about their love life. I realized that many of them had spent some time in foster care. This turned out to be the next logical step in the work I’d been doing – a documentary, and then a short film about a young man in foster care. It wasn’t something conscious at first, but I do know now that as the foundation for a project, there is always, for me, the necessity to document things. I need to believe, I have a hard time believing films that are too artificial. I do like fantasy or sci-fi movies, but they still need to be realistic. Cinema is a rich man’s hobby, so placing the spotlight on people who usually remain in the shadows, and particularly trying to do so authentically, seems very important to me. It’s a political act. Hence the choice to work with non-professional actors: they instinctively know the characters’ way of speaking and their body language. Their faces tell a story.