2008 French Shooting Star Nicolas Cazalé is not the latest pretty-boy actor to be catapulted from obscurity to fame by a single box-office success. Instead, in the space of a couple of years, the 30-year-old actor has quietly built an impressive résumé of starring or co-starring roles in smaller films. His latest project, the schizophrenic love story Caótica Ana (Chaotic Ana) from Spanish auteur Julio Medem, is again unlikely to top the cinema charts when it will be released in the Netherlands on June 5 and in Belgium on August 6. But at least it is something of which Cazalé can be proud, as he told Boyd van Hoeij during the most recent Berlinale.

 

While French cinema reflects the experience of the country’s immigrant population with dramas that range from hard-hitting (Mathieu Kassovitz’s La haine) to sweetly dysfunctional (Abdellatif Kechiche’s L’esquive, La Graine et le mulet) and the Germans have the poignant dramas of Fatih Akin, Dutch cinema has taken the opposite route in recent years by talking to and about its immigrant population in all-inclusive blockbuster comedies. The genre also spawned several recognisable stars, including Mimoun Oaïssa and Maryam Hassouni, the Dutch Shooting Stars of 2006 and this year, respectively. The editor of european-films.net, Boyd van Hoeij, spoke with Maryam Hassouni before the premiere of Dunya & Desie at the Berlin Film Festival.