"It's crazy: You felt it coming!" Since the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas, following the massacre perpetrated by the Islamist group in Israel on October 7, 2023, and the outpouring of anti-Semitic acts and comments in France, Noé Debré has sometimes been attributed divinatory powers. His debut feature film, Le Dernier des juifs (A Nice Jewish Boy), in French cinemas on Wednesday, January 24, plays out in parallel with the news.

The film sketches the mundane life of a 27-year-old man-child, the last Jew in his hometown in the Paris suburbs, surrounded by a muted but tenacious anti-Semitism. Cinephiles like to draw the link between the fact that the 37-year-old director and screenwriter had previously co-written with Blanche Gardin the screenplay for Problemos, a spicy comedy released in 2017, which featured the hippie survivors of a pandemic, seemingly anticipating the Covid-19 catastrophe. Following that with this, is it not tempting to believe in his prescience? "Pfff, you bet, I've been developing A Nice Jewish Boy for over two years, with the impression of always being behind time," said the filmmaker with a laugh.

The film's origins lie in an image of a young Russian Jew alone in the middle of a German housing estate, seen in a 2020 short film (Masel Tov Cocktail, by Arkadij Khaet and Mickey Paatzsch), and conversations between friends. "When the resurgence of anti-Semitism came up in discussions, I had the opinion of a left-wing guy in denial, like we're exaggerating," said Debré, born Jewish into a middle-class family. "But one evening, I was struck by the story of a girl who told me that her parents, who lived in a housing estate, had to live with the inscription 'Vive Mohammed Merah' [Merah was a French jihadist who went on a killing spree in 2012 and, in Toulouse, killed a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school] tagged in the elevator. Every day, she wondered which of her neighbors could have written that."

From there, he and Elie Benchimol, an actor friend with whom he had offered to collaborate on the writing, began collecting testimonies in the Paris suburbs of Saint-Denis, Bagnolet, Stains, Cachan, Clichy-sous-Bois and Pierrefitte-sur-Seine. "We thought we shouldn't invent anything, so the script only reflects situations we've been told about. And we focused on everyday life, not the spectacular."

There's no threat or physical violence in A Nice Jewish Boy. Its hero, Ruben Bellisha, a 26-year-old Sephardic Jew, uneducated, bouncy and playful like a comic strip character (Michael Zindel, hilarious), lives in a housing estate in the northeastern Paris department of Seine-Saint-Denis with his sick mother, Giselle (Agnès Jaoui).

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