A Prophet
Autumn 2010 Features series
Sunday, October 10, 2010 at 4:00pm
Sunday, October 10, 2010 at 7:00pm
Acadia Cinema's Al Whittle Theatre
450 Main Street, Wolfville, NS
Directed by Jacques Audiard
Screenplay by Thomas Bidegain and Jacques Audiard
Starring Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Adel Bencherif, Reda Kateb
Rated 18A ·
2h 35m
France, Italy
French, Arabic, Corsican
A Prophet (Un prophète)
“When he enters prison at the beginning of the riveting French jailhouse drama A Prophet, Malik (striking newcomer Tahar Rahim) is a frightened and illiterate nobody, a baby-faced French Arab teenager with no family to care about his fate. When he leaves, at the end of a quietly stunning saga that won the Grand Prix at Cannes and was a worthy Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, Malik heralds a new kind of crime boss: a self-made somebody who rises to power not by being the biggest or toughest, but by being the quickest study.
Coerced into serving the brutal, aging César (The Bourne Ultimatum‘s forceful Niels Arestrup), leader of the Corsican Mob that rules over the Arab prison population, Malik proves to be more apt a pupil than César could ever have dreamed of the “Arab dog” who becomes his protege.
Filmmaker Jacques Audiard (The Beat That My Heart Skipped) has rightly called A Prophet his ‘anti-Scarface.’ Entertainment Weekly