A Prophet
Encyclopedia
A Prophet is a 2009 French prison film
Prison film
A prison film is a film genre concerned with prison life and often prison escape. These films range from acclaimed dramas examining the nature of prisons, like Cool Hand Luke, Brubaker, The Shawshank Redemption, Kiss of the Spider Woman, and Murder One to actioners like Lock Up, Undisputed, and...

 directed by Jacques Audiard
Jacques Audiard
Jacques Audiard is a French film director, the son of Michel Audiard, also a notable screenwriter and film director.He won twice both the César Award for Best Film and the BAFTA Award for Best Film not in the English Language, in 2005 for The Beat That My Heart Skipped and in 2010 for A Prophet...

. Audiard claims that the film aims at "creating icons, images for people who don't have images in movies, like the Arabs in France," though he also had stated that the film "has nothing to do with his vision of society," and is a work of fiction.

The film was a nominee for Best Foreign Language Film
Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film
The Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film is one of the Academy Awards of Merit, popularly known as the Oscars, handed out annually by the U.S.-based Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences...

 at the 82nd Academy Awards
82nd Academy Awards
The 82nd Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences , honored the best films of 2009 and took place March 7, 2010, at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles beginning at 5:30 p.m. PST / 8:30 p.m. EST. The ceremony was scheduled well after...

, in 2010, when the Oscar went to the Argentine crime drama, The Secret in Their Eyes.

Plot

Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim
Tahar Rahim
Tahar Rahim is a French actor of Algerian origin. Born in Belfort, France, his family is originally from the region of Oran, Algeria....

), nineteen years old, French of Algerian
Algeria
Algeria , officially the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria , also formally referred to as the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria, is a country in the Maghreb region of Northwest Africa with Algiers as its capital.In terms of land area, it is the largest country in Africa and the Arab...

 descent, is sentenced to six years in prison
Prison
A prison is a place in which people are physically confined and, usually, deprived of a range of personal freedoms. Imprisonment or incarceration is a legal penalty that may be imposed by the state for the commission of a crime...

 for attacking police officers. Alone and illiterate upon his arrival, he falls under the sway of Corsican mobsters
Corsican mafia
The Corsican mafia is the general term used to describe the various criminal groups originating from Corsica. The Corsican mafia is one of the most influential organized crime structures in France, also active in many African and Latin American countries...

, led by Cesar Luciani (Niels Arestrup
Niels Arestrup
Niels Arestrup is a French actor.Born in Paris into a family of modest means, his father was Danish and his mother was French...

), who enforces a brutal rule.

The prison is divided between two main factions: the Corsicans and the Muslims. Malik keeps to himself. When Luciani forces him to be the unwilling assassin of Reyeb, a Muslim witness, Malik gains the protection of the Corsicans in spite of his race. Malik serves as a low-level servant to the Corsicans, who treat him with disdain. All the while, he is haunted by visions of the murdered Reyeb. When the bulk of the Corsicans are transferred or released, Luciani is forced to give Malik more responsibility. Having secretly learned Corsican
Corsican language
Corsican is a Italo-Dalmatian Romance language spoken and written on the islands of Corsica and northern Sardinia . Corsican is the traditional native language of the Corsican people, and was long the vernacular language alongside the Italian, official language in Corsica until 1859, which was...

, Malik acts as Luciani's eyes and ears in the prison. When Malik earns the privilege of day-long furloughs outside the prison, Luciani relies on him to conduct his business outside.

Ryad, a Muslim friend, teaches Malik to read and write, and the two become close. Ryad exposes Malik to his own heritage, allowing him to meet two other Muslims, Tarik and Hassan, increasing his power within the prison. Malik also becomes involved with a prison drug dealer, Jordi. When Ryad gains an early release due to his testicular cancer, the three partners organize a drug-running enterprise. But when Ryad is kidnapped by the drug dealer Latif, Malik tracks down Latif's partner inside the prison, kidnaps his family, and forces Latif's gang to release Ryad.

When Luciani discovers that Malik is using his furloughs for his own personal enterprise, he attacks him. Malik is sent to meet Brahim Lattrache in Marseille, another Muslim, who is involved in a deal between Luciani and the Lingherris, an Italian mafia group. Lattrache is bitter toward the Corsicans for the murder of Reyeb and holds Malik at gunpoint. When Malik spots a deer warning sign, he remembers a recent dream of deer running in the road. He tells his kidnappers that they are in danger of hitting a deer, which they promptly do. Lattrache is impressed by Malik, calling him a prophet and agreeing to do business with him instead of Luciani.

Luciani believes there is a mole in his organization. He decides to use Malik to assassinate Jacky Marcaggi, the Don
Crime boss
A crime boss or boss is a person in charge of a criminal organization. A boss typically has absolute or near-absolute control over his subordinates, is greatly feared by his subordinates for his ruthlessness and willingness to take lives in order to exert his influence, and profits come from the...

 of the Corsican mafia, for secretly dealing with the Lingherris. Outside the prison, Malik and Ryad betray Luciani's accomplice Vettori and kill Marcaggi’s bodyguards. Rather than kill Marcaggi, they dump him in a vehicle with Vettori. Malik takes refuge at Ryad's house with his wife and young son; Ryad reveals that his cancer has returned.

When Malik returns to the prison, he joins the Muslim side of the yard, having built a place of power within their faction. When Luciani tries to approach him, two Muslims intercept and beat him. When Malik's sentence ends, Ryad's wife and son meet him outside the prison. She invites him to take her son’s bedroom, and he walks with them to the bus stop, followed by a coterie of his protectors.

Cast

  • Tahar Rahim
    Tahar Rahim
    Tahar Rahim is a French actor of Algerian origin. Born in Belfort, France, his family is originally from the region of Oran, Algeria....

     as Malik El Djebena
  • Niels Arestrup
    Niels Arestrup
    Niels Arestrup is a French actor.Born in Paris into a family of modest means, his father was Danish and his mother was French...

     as César Luciani
  • Adel Bencherif
    Adel Bencherif
    Adel Bencherif is a French actor of Tunisian origin.He is most famous for his role in the 2009 film A Prophet.-Filmography:*2004: Safia et Sarah*2005: Ze film*2006: Paris, je t'aime*2006: Cages*2006: Djihad!...

     as Ryad
  • Reda Kateb as Jordi Le Gitan
  • Hichem Yacoubi
    Hichem Yacoubi
    Hichem Yacoubi - is an actor of Moroccan descent whose most recent film was A Prophet directed by Jacques Audiard. He studied theater and dance...

     as Reyeb
  • Jean-Philippe Ricci as Vettori

  • Gilles Cohen as Prof
  • Antoine Basler as Pilicci
  • Leïla Bekhti
    Leïla Bekhti
    Leïla Bekhti is a French film and television actress of Algerian origin. She is best known for her roles in Sheitan, Tout ce qui brille and Paris, je t'aime.-Life and career:...

     as Djamila, Ryad's wife
  • Pierre Leccia as Sampierro
  • Foued Nassah as Antaro
  • Jean-Emmanuel Pagni as Santi

  • Frédéric Graziani as Chef de détention
  • Sumane Dazi as Lattrache
  • Alaa Oumouzoune as Rebelled prisoner
  • Salem Kali as Le prisonnier mutin
  • Pascal Henault as Ceccaldi (un corse)
  • Sonia Hell as Une matonne


Production

The film's screenplay, re-worked by Jacques Audiard and Thomas Bidegain, was submitted to them by a producer, though the idea of making a film set in prison first came to Audiard after he had a film screened in a prison and was shocked by the conditions there.

Audiard cast Niels Arestrup
Niels Arestrup
Niels Arestrup is a French actor.Born in Paris into a family of modest means, his father was Danish and his mother was French...

, featured in Audiard's previous film, The Beat that My Heart Skipped
The Beat That My Heart Skipped
The Beat That My Heart Skipped is a 2005 French film directed by Jacques Audiard and starring Romain Duris. It tells the story of Tom, a real estate thug torn between a criminal life and his desire to become a concert pianist. The film premiered on February 17, 2005 at the Berlin Film Festival...

as the Corsican crime boss
Crime boss
A crime boss or boss is a person in charge of a criminal organization. A boss typically has absolute or near-absolute control over his subordinates, is greatly feared by his subordinates for his ruthlessness and willingness to take lives in order to exert his influence, and profits come from the...

 César Luciani, and met Tahar Rahim, who plays Malik, when they shared an automobile ride from another film set. To ensure the authenticity of the prison experience, Audiard hired former convict
Convict
A convict is "a person found guilty of a crime and sentenced by a court" or "a person serving a sentence in prison", sometimes referred to in slang as simply a "con". Convicts are often called prisoners or inmates. Persons convicted and sentenced to non-custodial sentences often are not termed...

s as advisors and extras
Extra (actor)
A background actor or extra is a performer in a film, television show, stage, musical, opera or ballet production, who appears in a nonspeaking, nonsinging or nondancing capacity, usually in the background...

.

Reception

A Prophet has received widespread critical acclaim. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...

 gives the film a score of 97% based on reviews from 143 critics, with an average score of 8.3/10. Metacritic
Metacritic
Metacritic.com is a website that collates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green,...

 gave the film a weighted score of 90/100, based on 30 critics, which it ranks as "universal acclaim".

Reception of the film after its debut screening at 2009 Cannes Film Festival
2009 Cannes Film Festival
The 62nd annual Cannes Film Festival was held from May 13 to May 24, 2009. French actress Isabelle Huppert was the President of the Jury. It was announced on March 19, 2009, that Pixar's film Up would open the festival...

 at the competition
Palme d'Or
The Palme d'Or is the highest prize awarded at the Cannes Film Festival and is presented to the director of the best feature film of the official competition. It was introduced in 1955 by the organising committee. From 1939 to 1954, the highest prize was the Grand Prix du Festival International du...

 was good. A Prophet was picked as the best film of the festival by a group of sixteen English language critics
Film criticism
Film criticism is the analysis and evaluation of films, individually and collectively. In general, this can be divided into journalistic criticism that appears regularly in newspapers, and other popular, mass-media outlets and academic criticism by film scholars that is informed by film theory and...

 and blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...

gers polled by the daily independent film news site indieWIRE
IndieWire
indieWIRE is a daily news site for the independent film community. It covers indie, documentary and foreign language films, as well industry news, film festival reports, filmmaker interviews and movie reviews...

.

Karin Badt at The Huffington Post
The Huffington Post
The Huffington Post is an American news website and content-aggregating blog founded by Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer, and Jonah Peretti, featuring liberal minded columnists and various news sources. The site offers coverage of politics, theology, media, business, entertainment, living, style,...

called it "refreshingly free". Jonathan Romney of Screen International
Screen International
Screen International is a multimedia film magazine covering the international film business. It is published by EMAP, a British b2b media company.The magazine is primarily aimed at those involved in the global movie business...

 said that the film "works both as hard-edged, painstaking detailed social realism and as a compelling genre entertainment."

Luke Davies
Luke Davies
Luke Davies is an Australian writer of novels, poetry and screenplays, born in Sydney in 1962.Davies' first poetry collection, Four Plots for Magnets, was published in 1982, when he was twenty....

 of The Monthly
The Monthly
The Monthly is an Australian national magazine of politics, society and the arts, which is published eleven times per year on a monthly basis except the December/January issue. Founded in 2005, it is published by Melbourne property developer Morry Schwartz...

criticized some of the film's stylistic methodology and content, asserting that the prophetic themes could have been stretched out, but he celebrated the film's central character and his well-executed "improbable rise from invisibility to dominance", describing "what gives [the film] such dynamic energy is the seamlessness with which this transition unfolds". Davies described the film's main achievement as conveying a character "someone we care about and gun for" who started life on screen as a blank slate.

Awards

The film was the submission of France for the
82nd Academy Awards
82nd Academy Awards
The 82nd Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences , honored the best films of 2009 and took place March 7, 2010, at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles beginning at 5:30 p.m. PST / 8:30 p.m. EST. The ceremony was scheduled well after...

 for Best Foreign Film. On February 2, 2010, when Academy Award nominations were announced, A Prophet received a nomination for Best Foreign Language film. The other four films in the category were Ajami
Ajami (film)
Ajami is a 2009 Arab/Jewish collaboration drama film. Its plot is set in the Ajami neighborhood of Jaffa.-Overview:Written and directed by Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani , Ajami explores five different stories set in an actual impoverished Christian-and-Muslim Arab neighborhood of the Tel...

, The Milk of Sorrow
The Milk of Sorrow
While some Peruvian critics gave the movie negative reviews, the plot and performance were praised by American and European critics.- Film Awards:...

and The White Ribbon
The White Ribbon
The White Ribbon is a 2009 Austrian-German film, released in black and white, written and directed by Michael Haneke. The drama darkly depicts society and family in a northern German village just before World War I...

, and the eventual winner, El secreto de sus ojos
El secreto de sus ojos
The Secret in Their Eyes is a 2009 Argentine crime thriller, directed by Juan José Campanella, based on Eduardo Sacheri's novel La Pregunta de Sus Ojos...

.

A Prophet won the Grand Prix
Grand Prix (Cannes Film Festival)
The Grand Prix is an award of the Cannes Film Festival bestowed by the jury of the festival on one of the competing feature films. It is the second-most prestigious prize of the festival after the Palme d'Or...

 at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. At the 53rd London Film Festival
London Film Festival
The BFI London Film Festival is the UK's largest public film event, screening more than 300 features, documentaries and shorts from almost 50 countries. The festival, , currently in its 54th year, is run every year in the second half of October under the umbrella of the British Film Institute...

, it won the Best Film Award. It won the Prix Louis Delluc 2009. At the 63rd British Academy Film Awards
63rd British Academy Film Awards
The 63rd British Academy Film Awards, hosted by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, took place on 21 February 2010 and honoured the best films of 2009. The Hurt Locker took home the most awards, receiving 6 BAFTAS...

, it won a BAFTA for Best Film Not in the English Language. It was nominated for 13 César Awards, tying it with three other films for the most nominations of any film in César history. It won 9 Cesars at the ceremony, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor. The film also won Best Foreign Film at the 13th annual British Independent Film Awards, which were held in London at the Old Billingsgate on December 5th, 2010.

A Prophet was also nominated for Best International Film at the 8th Irish Film and Television Awards
8th Irish Film and Television Awards
The 8th Irish Film and Television Awards took place on 12 February 2011 in the Convention Centre, Dublin.It was hosted by Simon Delaney. The Awards show was broadcast live on RTÉ One television in Ireland....

, an award that went to The Social Network
The Social Network
The Social Network is a 2010 American drama film directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin. Adapted from Ben Mezrich's 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires, the film portrays the founding of social networking website Facebook and the resulting lawsuits...

.

In 2010 Empire
Empire (magazine)
Empire is a British film magazine published monthly by Bauer Consumer Media. From the first issue in July 1989, the magazine was edited by Barry McIlheney and published by Emap. Bauer purchased Emap Consumer Media in early 2008...

magazine ranked it at number 63 in its "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" list.

External links

Official Website US
A Prophet is a 2009 French prison film
Prison film
A prison film is a film genre concerned with prison life and often prison escape. These films range from acclaimed dramas examining the nature of prisons, like Cool Hand Luke, Brubaker, The Shawshank Redemption, Kiss of the Spider Woman, and Murder One to actioners like Lock Up, Undisputed, and...

 directed by Jacques Audiard
Jacques Audiard
Jacques Audiard is a French film director, the son of Michel Audiard, also a notable screenwriter and film director.He won twice both the César Award for Best Film and the BAFTA Award for Best Film not in the English Language, in 2005 for The Beat That My Heart Skipped and in 2010 for A Prophet...

. Audiard claims that the film aims at "creating icons, images for people who don't have images in movies, like the Arabs in France," though he also had stated that the film "has nothing to do with his vision of society," and is a work of fiction.

The film was a nominee for Best Foreign Language Film
Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film
The Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film is one of the Academy Awards of Merit, popularly known as the Oscars, handed out annually by the U.S.-based Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences...

 at the 82nd Academy Awards
82nd Academy Awards
The 82nd Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences , honored the best films of 2009 and took place March 7, 2010, at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles beginning at 5:30 p.m. PST / 8:30 p.m. EST. The ceremony was scheduled well after...

, in 2010, when the Oscar went to the Argentine crime drama, The Secret in Their Eyes.

Plot

Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim
Tahar Rahim
Tahar Rahim is a French actor of Algerian origin. Born in Belfort, France, his family is originally from the region of Oran, Algeria....

), nineteen years old, French of Algerian
Algeria
Algeria , officially the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria , also formally referred to as the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria, is a country in the Maghreb region of Northwest Africa with Algiers as its capital.In terms of land area, it is the largest country in Africa and the Arab...

 descent, is sentenced to six years in prison
Prison
A prison is a place in which people are physically confined and, usually, deprived of a range of personal freedoms. Imprisonment or incarceration is a legal penalty that may be imposed by the state for the commission of a crime...

 for attacking police officers. Alone and illiterate upon his arrival, he falls under the sway of Corsican mobsters
Corsican mafia
The Corsican mafia is the general term used to describe the various criminal groups originating from Corsica. The Corsican mafia is one of the most influential organized crime structures in France, also active in many African and Latin American countries...

, led by Cesar Luciani (Niels Arestrup
Niels Arestrup
Niels Arestrup is a French actor.Born in Paris into a family of modest means, his father was Danish and his mother was French...

), who enforces a brutal rule.

The prison is divided between two main factions: the Corsicans and the Muslims. Malik keeps to himself. When Luciani forces him to be the unwilling assassin of Reyeb, a Muslim witness, Malik gains the protection of the Corsicans in spite of his race. Malik serves as a low-level servant to the Corsicans, who treat him with disdain. All the while, he is haunted by visions of the murdered Reyeb. When the bulk of the Corsicans are transferred or released, Luciani is forced to give Malik more responsibility. Having secretly learned Corsican
Corsican language
Corsican is a Italo-Dalmatian Romance language spoken and written on the islands of Corsica and northern Sardinia . Corsican is the traditional native language of the Corsican people, and was long the vernacular language alongside the Italian, official language in Corsica until 1859, which was...

, Malik acts as Luciani's eyes and ears in the prison. When Malik earns the privilege of day-long furloughs outside the prison, Luciani relies on him to conduct his business outside.

Ryad, a Muslim friend, teaches Malik to read and write, and the two become close. Ryad exposes Malik to his own heritage, allowing him to meet two other Muslims, Tarik and Hassan, increasing his power within the prison. Malik also becomes involved with a prison drug dealer, Jordi. When Ryad gains an early release due to his testicular cancer, the three partners organize a drug-running enterprise. But when Ryad is kidnapped by the drug dealer Latif, Malik tracks down Latif's partner inside the prison, kidnaps his family, and forces Latif's gang to release Ryad.

When Luciani discovers that Malik is using his furloughs for his own personal enterprise, he attacks him. Malik is sent to meet Brahim Lattrache in Marseille, another Muslim, who is involved in a deal between Luciani and the Lingherris, an Italian mafia group. Lattrache is bitter toward the Corsicans for the murder of Reyeb and holds Malik at gunpoint. When Malik spots a deer warning sign, he remembers a recent dream of deer running in the road. He tells his kidnappers that they are in danger of hitting a deer, which they promptly do. Lattrache is impressed by Malik, calling him a prophet and agreeing to do business with him instead of Luciani.

Luciani believes there is a mole in his organization. He decides to use Malik to assassinate Jacky Marcaggi, the Don
Crime boss
A crime boss or boss is a person in charge of a criminal organization. A boss typically has absolute or near-absolute control over his subordinates, is greatly feared by his subordinates for his ruthlessness and willingness to take lives in order to exert his influence, and profits come from the...

 of the Corsican mafia, for secretly dealing with the Lingherris. Outside the prison, Malik and Ryad betray Luciani's accomplice Vettori and kill Marcaggi’s bodyguards. Rather than kill Marcaggi, they dump him in a vehicle with Vettori. Malik takes refuge at Ryad's house with his wife and young son; Ryad reveals that his cancer has returned.

When Malik returns to the prison, he joins the Muslim side of the yard, having built a place of power within their faction. When Luciani tries to approach him, two Muslims intercept and beat him. When Malik's sentence ends, Ryad's wife and son meet him outside the prison. She invites him to take her son’s bedroom, and he walks with them to the bus stop, followed by a coterie of his protectors.

Cast

  • Tahar Rahim
    Tahar Rahim
    Tahar Rahim is a French actor of Algerian origin. Born in Belfort, France, his family is originally from the region of Oran, Algeria....

     as Malik El Djebena
  • Niels Arestrup
    Niels Arestrup
    Niels Arestrup is a French actor.Born in Paris into a family of modest means, his father was Danish and his mother was French...

     as César Luciani
  • Adel Bencherif
    Adel Bencherif
    Adel Bencherif is a French actor of Tunisian origin.He is most famous for his role in the 2009 film A Prophet.-Filmography:*2004: Safia et Sarah*2005: Ze film*2006: Paris, je t'aime*2006: Cages*2006: Djihad!...

     as Ryad
  • Reda Kateb as Jordi Le Gitan
  • Hichem Yacoubi
    Hichem Yacoubi
    Hichem Yacoubi - is an actor of Moroccan descent whose most recent film was A Prophet directed by Jacques Audiard. He studied theater and dance...

     as Reyeb
  • Jean-Philippe Ricci as Vettori

  • Gilles Cohen as Prof
  • Antoine Basler as Pilicci
  • Leïla Bekhti
    Leïla Bekhti
    Leïla Bekhti is a French film and television actress of Algerian origin. She is best known for her roles in Sheitan, Tout ce qui brille and Paris, je t'aime.-Life and career:...

     as Djamila, Ryad's wife
  • Pierre Leccia as Sampierro
  • Foued Nassah as Antaro
  • Jean-Emmanuel Pagni as Santi

  • Frédéric Graziani as Chef de détention
  • Sumane Dazi as Lattrache
  • Alaa Oumouzoune as Rebelled prisoner
  • Salem Kali as Le prisonnier mutin
  • Pascal Henault as Ceccaldi (un corse)
  • Sonia Hell as Une matonne


Production

The film's screenplay, re-worked by Jacques Audiard and Thomas Bidegain, was submitted to them by a producer, though the idea of making a film set in prison first came to Audiard after he had a film screened in a prison and was shocked by the conditions there.

Audiard cast Niels Arestrup
Niels Arestrup
Niels Arestrup is a French actor.Born in Paris into a family of modest means, his father was Danish and his mother was French...

, featured in Audiard's previous film, The Beat that My Heart Skipped
The Beat That My Heart Skipped
The Beat That My Heart Skipped is a 2005 French film directed by Jacques Audiard and starring Romain Duris. It tells the story of Tom, a real estate thug torn between a criminal life and his desire to become a concert pianist. The film premiered on February 17, 2005 at the Berlin Film Festival...

as the Corsican crime boss
Crime boss
A crime boss or boss is a person in charge of a criminal organization. A boss typically has absolute or near-absolute control over his subordinates, is greatly feared by his subordinates for his ruthlessness and willingness to take lives in order to exert his influence, and profits come from the...

 César Luciani, and met Tahar Rahim, who plays Malik, when they shared an automobile ride from another film set. To ensure the authenticity of the prison experience, Audiard hired former convict
Convict
A convict is "a person found guilty of a crime and sentenced by a court" or "a person serving a sentence in prison", sometimes referred to in slang as simply a "con". Convicts are often called prisoners or inmates. Persons convicted and sentenced to non-custodial sentences often are not termed...

s as advisors and extras
Extra (actor)
A background actor or extra is a performer in a film, television show, stage, musical, opera or ballet production, who appears in a nonspeaking, nonsinging or nondancing capacity, usually in the background...

.

Reception

A Prophet has received widespread critical acclaim. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...

 gives the film a score of 97% based on reviews from 143 critics, with an average score of 8.3/10. Metacritic
Metacritic
Metacritic.com is a website that collates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green,...

 gave the film a weighted score of 90/100, based on 30 critics, which it ranks as "universal acclaim".

Reception of the film after its debut screening at 2009 Cannes Film Festival
2009 Cannes Film Festival
The 62nd annual Cannes Film Festival was held from May 13 to May 24, 2009. French actress Isabelle Huppert was the President of the Jury. It was announced on March 19, 2009, that Pixar's film Up would open the festival...

 at the competition
Palme d'Or
The Palme d'Or is the highest prize awarded at the Cannes Film Festival and is presented to the director of the best feature film of the official competition. It was introduced in 1955 by the organising committee. From 1939 to 1954, the highest prize was the Grand Prix du Festival International du...

 was good. A Prophet was picked as the best film of the festival by a group of sixteen English language critics
Film criticism
Film criticism is the analysis and evaluation of films, individually and collectively. In general, this can be divided into journalistic criticism that appears regularly in newspapers, and other popular, mass-media outlets and academic criticism by film scholars that is informed by film theory and...

 and blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...

gers polled by the daily independent film news site indieWIRE
IndieWire
indieWIRE is a daily news site for the independent film community. It covers indie, documentary and foreign language films, as well industry news, film festival reports, filmmaker interviews and movie reviews...

.

Karin Badt at The Huffington Post
The Huffington Post
The Huffington Post is an American news website and content-aggregating blog founded by Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer, and Jonah Peretti, featuring liberal minded columnists and various news sources. The site offers coverage of politics, theology, media, business, entertainment, living, style,...

called it "refreshingly free". Jonathan Romney of Screen International
Screen International
Screen International is a multimedia film magazine covering the international film business. It is published by EMAP, a British b2b media company.The magazine is primarily aimed at those involved in the global movie business...

 said that the film "works both as hard-edged, painstaking detailed social realism and as a compelling genre entertainment."

Luke Davies
Luke Davies
Luke Davies is an Australian writer of novels, poetry and screenplays, born in Sydney in 1962.Davies' first poetry collection, Four Plots for Magnets, was published in 1982, when he was twenty....

 of The Monthly
The Monthly
The Monthly is an Australian national magazine of politics, society and the arts, which is published eleven times per year on a monthly basis except the December/January issue. Founded in 2005, it is published by Melbourne property developer Morry Schwartz...

criticized some of the film's stylistic methodology and content, asserting that the prophetic themes could have been stretched out, but he celebrated the film's central character and his well-executed "improbable rise from invisibility to dominance", describing "what gives [the film] such dynamic energy is the seamlessness with which this transition unfolds". Davies described the film's main achievement as conveying a character "someone we care about and gun for" who started life on screen as a blank slate.

Awards

The film was the submission of France for the
82nd Academy Awards
82nd Academy Awards
The 82nd Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences , honored the best films of 2009 and took place March 7, 2010, at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles beginning at 5:30 p.m. PST / 8:30 p.m. EST. The ceremony was scheduled well after...

 for Best Foreign Film. On February 2, 2010, when Academy Award nominations were announced, A Prophet received a nomination for Best Foreign Language film. The other four films in the category were Ajami
Ajami (film)
Ajami is a 2009 Arab/Jewish collaboration drama film. Its plot is set in the Ajami neighborhood of Jaffa.-Overview:Written and directed by Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani , Ajami explores five different stories set in an actual impoverished Christian-and-Muslim Arab neighborhood of the Tel...

, The Milk of Sorrow
The Milk of Sorrow
While some Peruvian critics gave the movie negative reviews, the plot and performance were praised by American and European critics.- Film Awards:...

and The White Ribbon
The White Ribbon
The White Ribbon is a 2009 Austrian-German film, released in black and white, written and directed by Michael Haneke. The drama darkly depicts society and family in a northern German village just before World War I...

, and the eventual winner, El secreto de sus ojos
El secreto de sus ojos
The Secret in Their Eyes is a 2009 Argentine crime thriller, directed by Juan José Campanella, based on Eduardo Sacheri's novel La Pregunta de Sus Ojos...

.

A Prophet won the Grand Prix
Grand Prix (Cannes Film Festival)
The Grand Prix is an award of the Cannes Film Festival bestowed by the jury of the festival on one of the competing feature films. It is the second-most prestigious prize of the festival after the Palme d'Or...

 at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. At the 53rd London Film Festival
London Film Festival
The BFI London Film Festival is the UK's largest public film event, screening more than 300 features, documentaries and shorts from almost 50 countries. The festival, , currently in its 54th year, is run every year in the second half of October under the umbrella of the British Film Institute...

, it won the Best Film Award. It won the Prix Louis Delluc 2009. At the 63rd British Academy Film Awards
63rd British Academy Film Awards
The 63rd British Academy Film Awards, hosted by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, took place on 21 February 2010 and honoured the best films of 2009. The Hurt Locker took home the most awards, receiving 6 BAFTAS...

, it won a BAFTA for Best Film Not in the English Language. It was nominated for 13 César Awards, tying it with three other films for the most nominations of any film in César history. It won 9 Cesars at the ceremony, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor. The film also won Best Foreign Film at the 13th annual British Independent Film Awards, which were held in London at the Old Billingsgate on December 5th, 2010.

A Prophet was also nominated for Best International Film at the 8th Irish Film and Television Awards
8th Irish Film and Television Awards
The 8th Irish Film and Television Awards took place on 12 February 2011 in the Convention Centre, Dublin.It was hosted by Simon Delaney. The Awards show was broadcast live on RTÉ One television in Ireland....

, an award that went to The Social Network
The Social Network
The Social Network is a 2010 American drama film directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin. Adapted from Ben Mezrich's 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires, the film portrays the founding of social networking website Facebook and the resulting lawsuits...

.

In 2010 Empire
Empire (magazine)
Empire is a British film magazine published monthly by Bauer Consumer Media. From the first issue in July 1989, the magazine was edited by Barry McIlheney and published by Emap. Bauer purchased Emap Consumer Media in early 2008...

magazine ranked it at number 63 in its "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" list.

External links

Official Website US
A Prophet is a 2009 French prison film
Prison film
A prison film is a film genre concerned with prison life and often prison escape. These films range from acclaimed dramas examining the nature of prisons, like Cool Hand Luke, Brubaker, The Shawshank Redemption, Kiss of the Spider Woman, and Murder One to actioners like Lock Up, Undisputed, and...

 directed by Jacques Audiard
Jacques Audiard
Jacques Audiard is a French film director, the son of Michel Audiard, also a notable screenwriter and film director.He won twice both the César Award for Best Film and the BAFTA Award for Best Film not in the English Language, in 2005 for The Beat That My Heart Skipped and in 2010 for A Prophet...

. Audiard claims that the film aims at "creating icons, images for people who don't have images in movies, like the Arabs in France," though he also had stated that the film "has nothing to do with his vision of society," and is a work of fiction.

The film was a nominee for Best Foreign Language Film
Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film
The Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film is one of the Academy Awards of Merit, popularly known as the Oscars, handed out annually by the U.S.-based Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences...

 at the 82nd Academy Awards
82nd Academy Awards
The 82nd Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences , honored the best films of 2009 and took place March 7, 2010, at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles beginning at 5:30 p.m. PST / 8:30 p.m. EST. The ceremony was scheduled well after...

, in 2010, when the Oscar went to the Argentine crime drama, The Secret in Their Eyes.

Plot

Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim
Tahar Rahim
Tahar Rahim is a French actor of Algerian origin. Born in Belfort, France, his family is originally from the region of Oran, Algeria....

), nineteen years old, French of Algerian
Algeria
Algeria , officially the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria , also formally referred to as the Democratic and Popular Republic of Algeria, is a country in the Maghreb region of Northwest Africa with Algiers as its capital.In terms of land area, it is the largest country in Africa and the Arab...

 descent, is sentenced to six years in prison
Prison
A prison is a place in which people are physically confined and, usually, deprived of a range of personal freedoms. Imprisonment or incarceration is a legal penalty that may be imposed by the state for the commission of a crime...

 for attacking police officers. Alone and illiterate upon his arrival, he falls under the sway of Corsican mobsters
Corsican mafia
The Corsican mafia is the general term used to describe the various criminal groups originating from Corsica. The Corsican mafia is one of the most influential organized crime structures in France, also active in many African and Latin American countries...

, led by Cesar Luciani (Niels Arestrup
Niels Arestrup
Niels Arestrup is a French actor.Born in Paris into a family of modest means, his father was Danish and his mother was French...

), who enforces a brutal rule.

The prison is divided between two main factions: the Corsicans and the Muslims. Malik keeps to himself. When Luciani forces him to be the unwilling assassin of Reyeb, a Muslim witness, Malik gains the protection of the Corsicans in spite of his race. Malik serves as a low-level servant to the Corsicans, who treat him with disdain. All the while, he is haunted by visions of the murdered Reyeb. When the bulk of the Corsicans are transferred or released, Luciani is forced to give Malik more responsibility. Having secretly learned Corsican
Corsican language
Corsican is a Italo-Dalmatian Romance language spoken and written on the islands of Corsica and northern Sardinia . Corsican is the traditional native language of the Corsican people, and was long the vernacular language alongside the Italian, official language in Corsica until 1859, which was...

, Malik acts as Luciani's eyes and ears in the prison. When Malik earns the privilege of day-long furloughs outside the prison, Luciani relies on him to conduct his business outside.

Ryad, a Muslim friend, teaches Malik to read and write, and the two become close. Ryad exposes Malik to his own heritage, allowing him to meet two other Muslims, Tarik and Hassan, increasing his power within the prison. Malik also becomes involved with a prison drug dealer, Jordi. When Ryad gains an early release due to his testicular cancer, the three partners organize a drug-running enterprise. But when Ryad is kidnapped by the drug dealer Latif, Malik tracks down Latif's partner inside the prison, kidnaps his family, and forces Latif's gang to release Ryad.

When Luciani discovers that Malik is using his furloughs for his own personal enterprise, he attacks him. Malik is sent to meet Brahim Lattrache in Marseille, another Muslim, who is involved in a deal between Luciani and the Lingherris, an Italian mafia group. Lattrache is bitter toward the Corsicans for the murder of Reyeb and holds Malik at gunpoint. When Malik spots a deer warning sign, he remembers a recent dream of deer running in the road. He tells his kidnappers that they are in danger of hitting a deer, which they promptly do. Lattrache is impressed by Malik, calling him a prophet and agreeing to do business with him instead of Luciani.

Luciani believes there is a mole in his organization. He decides to use Malik to assassinate Jacky Marcaggi, the Don
Crime boss
A crime boss or boss is a person in charge of a criminal organization. A boss typically has absolute or near-absolute control over his subordinates, is greatly feared by his subordinates for his ruthlessness and willingness to take lives in order to exert his influence, and profits come from the...

 of the Corsican mafia, for secretly dealing with the Lingherris. Outside the prison, Malik and Ryad betray Luciani's accomplice Vettori and kill Marcaggi’s bodyguards. Rather than kill Marcaggi, they dump him in a vehicle with Vettori. Malik takes refuge at Ryad's house with his wife and young son; Ryad reveals that his cancer has returned.

When Malik returns to the prison, he joins the Muslim side of the yard, having built a place of power within their faction. When Luciani tries to approach him, two Muslims intercept and beat him. When Malik's sentence ends, Ryad's wife and son meet him outside the prison. She invites him to take her son’s bedroom, and he walks with them to the bus stop, followed by a coterie of his protectors.

Cast

  • Tahar Rahim
    Tahar Rahim
    Tahar Rahim is a French actor of Algerian origin. Born in Belfort, France, his family is originally from the region of Oran, Algeria....

     as Malik El Djebena
  • Niels Arestrup
    Niels Arestrup
    Niels Arestrup is a French actor.Born in Paris into a family of modest means, his father was Danish and his mother was French...

     as César Luciani
  • Adel Bencherif
    Adel Bencherif
    Adel Bencherif is a French actor of Tunisian origin.He is most famous for his role in the 2009 film A Prophet.-Filmography:*2004: Safia et Sarah*2005: Ze film*2006: Paris, je t'aime*2006: Cages*2006: Djihad!...

     as Ryad
  • Reda Kateb as Jordi Le Gitan
  • Hichem Yacoubi
    Hichem Yacoubi
    Hichem Yacoubi - is an actor of Moroccan descent whose most recent film was A Prophet directed by Jacques Audiard. He studied theater and dance...

     as Reyeb
  • Jean-Philippe Ricci as Vettori

  • Gilles Cohen as Prof
  • Antoine Basler as Pilicci
  • Leïla Bekhti
    Leïla Bekhti
    Leïla Bekhti is a French film and television actress of Algerian origin. She is best known for her roles in Sheitan, Tout ce qui brille and Paris, je t'aime.-Life and career:...

     as Djamila, Ryad's wife
  • Pierre Leccia as Sampierro
  • Foued Nassah as Antaro
  • Jean-Emmanuel Pagni as Santi

  • Frédéric Graziani as Chef de détention
  • Sumane Dazi as Lattrache
  • Alaa Oumouzoune as Rebelled prisoner
  • Salem Kali as Le prisonnier mutin
  • Pascal Henault as Ceccaldi (un corse)
  • Sonia Hell as Une matonne


Production

The film's screenplay, re-worked by Jacques Audiard and Thomas Bidegain, was submitted to them by a producer, though the idea of making a film set in prison first came to Audiard after he had a film screened in a prison and was shocked by the conditions there.

Audiard cast Niels Arestrup
Niels Arestrup
Niels Arestrup is a French actor.Born in Paris into a family of modest means, his father was Danish and his mother was French...

, featured in Audiard's previous film, The Beat that My Heart Skipped
The Beat That My Heart Skipped
The Beat That My Heart Skipped is a 2005 French film directed by Jacques Audiard and starring Romain Duris. It tells the story of Tom, a real estate thug torn between a criminal life and his desire to become a concert pianist. The film premiered on February 17, 2005 at the Berlin Film Festival...

as the Corsican crime boss
Crime boss
A crime boss or boss is a person in charge of a criminal organization. A boss typically has absolute or near-absolute control over his subordinates, is greatly feared by his subordinates for his ruthlessness and willingness to take lives in order to exert his influence, and profits come from the...

 César Luciani, and met Tahar Rahim, who plays Malik, when they shared an automobile ride from another film set. To ensure the authenticity of the prison experience, Audiard hired former convict
Convict
A convict is "a person found guilty of a crime and sentenced by a court" or "a person serving a sentence in prison", sometimes referred to in slang as simply a "con". Convicts are often called prisoners or inmates. Persons convicted and sentenced to non-custodial sentences often are not termed...

s as advisors and extras
Extra (actor)
A background actor or extra is a performer in a film, television show, stage, musical, opera or ballet production, who appears in a nonspeaking, nonsinging or nondancing capacity, usually in the background...

.

Reception

A Prophet has received widespread critical acclaim. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...

 gives the film a score of 97% based on reviews from 143 critics, with an average score of 8.3/10. Metacritic
Metacritic
Metacritic.com is a website that collates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green,...

 gave the film a weighted score of 90/100, based on 30 critics, which it ranks as "universal acclaim".

Reception of the film after its debut screening at 2009 Cannes Film Festival
2009 Cannes Film Festival
The 62nd annual Cannes Film Festival was held from May 13 to May 24, 2009. French actress Isabelle Huppert was the President of the Jury. It was announced on March 19, 2009, that Pixar's film Up would open the festival...

 at the competition
Palme d'Or
The Palme d'Or is the highest prize awarded at the Cannes Film Festival and is presented to the director of the best feature film of the official competition. It was introduced in 1955 by the organising committee. From 1939 to 1954, the highest prize was the Grand Prix du Festival International du...

 was good. A Prophet was picked as the best film of the festival by a group of sixteen English language critics
Film criticism
Film criticism is the analysis and evaluation of films, individually and collectively. In general, this can be divided into journalistic criticism that appears regularly in newspapers, and other popular, mass-media outlets and academic criticism by film scholars that is informed by film theory and...

 and blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...

gers polled by the daily independent film news site indieWIRE
IndieWire
indieWIRE is a daily news site for the independent film community. It covers indie, documentary and foreign language films, as well industry news, film festival reports, filmmaker interviews and movie reviews...

.

Karin Badt at The Huffington Post
The Huffington Post
The Huffington Post is an American news website and content-aggregating blog founded by Arianna Huffington, Kenneth Lerer, and Jonah Peretti, featuring liberal minded columnists and various news sources. The site offers coverage of politics, theology, media, business, entertainment, living, style,...

called it "refreshingly free". Jonathan Romney of Screen International
Screen International
Screen International is a multimedia film magazine covering the international film business. It is published by EMAP, a British b2b media company.The magazine is primarily aimed at those involved in the global movie business...

 said that the film "works both as hard-edged, painstaking detailed social realism and as a compelling genre entertainment."

Luke Davies
Luke Davies
Luke Davies is an Australian writer of novels, poetry and screenplays, born in Sydney in 1962.Davies' first poetry collection, Four Plots for Magnets, was published in 1982, when he was twenty....

 of The Monthly
The Monthly
The Monthly is an Australian national magazine of politics, society and the arts, which is published eleven times per year on a monthly basis except the December/January issue. Founded in 2005, it is published by Melbourne property developer Morry Schwartz...

criticized some of the film's stylistic methodology and content, asserting that the prophetic themes could have been stretched out, but he celebrated the film's central character and his well-executed "improbable rise from invisibility to dominance", describing "what gives [the film] such dynamic energy is the seamlessness with which this transition unfolds". Davies described the film's main achievement as conveying a character "someone we care about and gun for" who started life on screen as a blank slate.

Awards

The film was the submission of France for the
82nd Academy Awards
82nd Academy Awards
The 82nd Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences , honored the best films of 2009 and took place March 7, 2010, at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles beginning at 5:30 p.m. PST / 8:30 p.m. EST. The ceremony was scheduled well after...

 for Best Foreign Film. On February 2, 2010, when Academy Award nominations were announced, A Prophet received a nomination for Best Foreign Language film. The other four films in the category were Ajami
Ajami (film)
Ajami is a 2009 Arab/Jewish collaboration drama film. Its plot is set in the Ajami neighborhood of Jaffa.-Overview:Written and directed by Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani , Ajami explores five different stories set in an actual impoverished Christian-and-Muslim Arab neighborhood of the Tel...

, The Milk of Sorrow
The Milk of Sorrow
While some Peruvian critics gave the movie negative reviews, the plot and performance were praised by American and European critics.- Film Awards:...

and The White Ribbon
The White Ribbon
The White Ribbon is a 2009 Austrian-German film, released in black and white, written and directed by Michael Haneke. The drama darkly depicts society and family in a northern German village just before World War I...

, and the eventual winner, El secreto de sus ojos
El secreto de sus ojos
The Secret in Their Eyes is a 2009 Argentine crime thriller, directed by Juan José Campanella, based on Eduardo Sacheri's novel La Pregunta de Sus Ojos...

.

A Prophet won the Grand Prix
Grand Prix (Cannes Film Festival)
The Grand Prix is an award of the Cannes Film Festival bestowed by the jury of the festival on one of the competing feature films. It is the second-most prestigious prize of the festival after the Palme d'Or...

 at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. At the 53rd London Film Festival
London Film Festival
The BFI London Film Festival is the UK's largest public film event, screening more than 300 features, documentaries and shorts from almost 50 countries. The festival, , currently in its 54th year, is run every year in the second half of October under the umbrella of the British Film Institute...

, it won the Best Film Award. It won the Prix Louis Delluc 2009. At the 63rd British Academy Film Awards
63rd British Academy Film Awards
The 63rd British Academy Film Awards, hosted by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, took place on 21 February 2010 and honoured the best films of 2009. The Hurt Locker took home the most awards, receiving 6 BAFTAS...

, it won a BAFTA for Best Film Not in the English Language. It was nominated for 13 César Awards, tying it with three other films for the most nominations of any film in César history. It won 9 Cesars at the ceremony, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor. The film also won Best Foreign Film at the 13th annual British Independent Film Awards, which were held in London at the Old Billingsgate on December 5th, 2010.

A Prophet was also nominated for Best International Film at the 8th Irish Film and Television Awards
8th Irish Film and Television Awards
The 8th Irish Film and Television Awards took place on 12 February 2011 in the Convention Centre, Dublin.It was hosted by Simon Delaney. The Awards show was broadcast live on RTÉ One television in Ireland....

, an award that went to The Social Network
The Social Network
The Social Network is a 2010 American drama film directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin. Adapted from Ben Mezrich's 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires, the film portrays the founding of social networking website Facebook and the resulting lawsuits...

.

In 2010 Empire
Empire (magazine)
Empire is a British film magazine published monthly by Bauer Consumer Media. From the first issue in July 1989, the magazine was edited by Barry McIlheney and published by Emap. Bauer purchased Emap Consumer Media in early 2008...

magazine ranked it at number 63 in its "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" list.

External links

Official Website US
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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