‘Paris Paris’ Director on Her Fiction Feature Debut That Is “Very Political, But Not in Your Face”

See Paris and die! See Paris Paris and see the world differently!

The title of the debut fiction feature of Belgian writer-director Isabelle Tollenaere (Battles, Victoria), which world premieres on Tuesday, July 7 in the Proxima competition program of the 60th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF), hints at what awaits audiences in the drama about home, the idea of home and displacement.

Repetition as a way of keeping one’s memory of home alive, for example. And the fact that there is also a Paris, kind of, in China – Tianducheng, a huge residential development in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province that mimics buildings, boulevards and fountains in the French capital and even a 354-foot replica of the Eiffel Tower.

Paris Paris follows three men, Yi-En from China, Junior from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Hamzah from Palestine, who are undocumented immigrants and share a squatted apartment in a seemingly abandoned building in Paris. They share the experience of displacement, life in exile and the fleeting nature of possessions and relationships, as their current safe space comes under threat from outside forces.

The KVIFF website calls the film an “allegory of searching, loss, displacement, and the discovery of new meanings and commonalities.” It is set in “one of Europe’s great cities and in a replica of Paris built in China – a metaphor for the immigrants’ old dream of life in a new home and its gradual transformation into a new dream about their old home.”