June 3, 2022. Alone in her dressing room, Zahia Ziouani rehearses. His hands reproduce the beats and turn the pages of his opulent scores. A few minutes later, she will enter the Grande Salle Pierre-Boulez of the Philharmonie de Paris to conduct her symphony orchestra, Divertimento, in front of 2,500 spectators, including former President François Hollande. She is one of only 4% of women working in this profession.
In their delightful documentary, Emilie Thérond and Antonin Boutinard Rouelle immersed themselves in the preparation of this concert and portray Zahia Ziouani, driven by the idea of ??making excellence accessible to all.
At the heart of this project, the requirement as the purest form of consideration. Nourished by the triumph over the insults of her career, she brilliantly learned all the lessons by creating her space of expression. Daughter of music-loving Algerian immigrants, Zahia Ziouani grew up with her twin sister – a solo cellist – and their little brother in Pantin (where she still lives), in the suburbs of Paris. “We’re not going to lie to each other, people with an immigrant background in the classical music world can be counted on the fingers of one hand,” she said. He was very rarely welcoming to us at first. We succeeded because we were already an army of two. “Supporting archive images.
Abolish elitist borders
Zahia Ziouani, a musical prodigy, created Divertimento at the age of 19, out of her desire to have her students from Paris and Seine-Saint-Denis play together. The idea? Abolish the elitist boundaries of a very conservative environment and bring excellence to all audiences and all musicians. Thus Divertimento is a symphony orchestra, but it is also an academy, based in Stains (Seine-Saint-Denis), where its team trains young and striking musicians.
As the rehearsals follow one another before D-Day, we quickly follow the conductor in her daily life as a workaholic: between two sessions of energetic musical direction, she takes her musicians to meet high school students, play in rural areas, give symphonic breakdance concerts – one of the film’s sublime moments of artistic emotion –, or strives to pave the way for the orchestra-academy by seeking funding and partnerships.
“If you have any notes left, you don’t play them anymore, okay? », laughs the conductor with a brassy quack, at the end of a passage from the Danse Bacchanale, by Camille Saint-Saëns. The tension and the challenge are palpable, but Zahia Ziouani does not forget to mix her requirement with jokes to encourage her instrumentalists. We can only share the amazed eye of the authors of the documentary, as they highlight how the conductor breathes only for the music and for the transmission, by the power of the collective and the openness to all cultures, of this art.
Still, Zahia Ziouani and her sister are “one step ahead”, as the title suggests. “I have been fighting for many years to be given the same means. Why, when you play in Stains or Saint-Denis, do you consider it more like city politics, while when you play in the big Parisian halls, do you consider it culture? “Asks the one who would have the makings of a minister, according to Mouloud Achour, who interviewed him on Europe 1.
