„I don’t want to be Foottit’s [(or) Foot-it] stooge anymore. I want to be taken seriously”. Chocolat (2016): Postmigration and French Biopic Film

Abstract

The French biopic film, a genre that has become very popular in recent years, offers the opportunity to (re)discover the biographies of symbolic figures in history and to continuously present the history of France through the prism of the myth of a “great nation”. Since La Môme in 2007 and its overwhelming success, series of productions around France's great personalities from culture, arts and politics have followed one another. From Molière to De Gaulle and Mesrine to Gainsbourg, the biopic in France has remained very national and nationalistic overall. The emergence of the Double Wave directors had an influence not only on French cinema in general, but also on the biopic itself. This paper will use Chocolat (2016) by Roschdy Zem to outline the critical approach of post-migrant film works towards the French biopic and, in the same context, their positioning towards a more regular (post-)colonial collective memory in France.