Via RFI:
Who says Muslims can’t be funny? That’s the tagline for a project by a French team that has produced 18 short movies in the last two years that take a humourous look at being a Muslim in France. With 14 million hits on its website, the project has attracted attention but it has had trouble moving into mainstream television.
The Bordeaux-based filmmakers - known collectively as A part ça, tout va bien (Besides that, everything’s fine) - have taken on the tricky subject as the French government has been debating secularism and the role of Islam in society.
(...)
The project was the brainchild of film director Zangro - an atheist - who approached Zaouri two years ago. Zaouri, who had his own one-man show (and still does), says he was not interested at first.
“I said, 'No, leave me alone; I don’t want to touch it.' The subject of Islam for me was too sensitive in France,” he says. “Then I asked myself: Why don't I want to laugh about what scares me? I realised that dedramatising something is to appropriate it. If you laugh about it, you can appropriate it. So I said OK, let's start.”
The first sketches were filmed in Morocco. Then they started making movies from their home base in the suburbs of the western French city of Bordeaux.(source)
