PSAROKOKALO MAGAZINE, LIVE ACTION
NE ME QUITTE PAS
When Memory and History Invade Paradise
Interview with Karim Huu Do
"The film shows that true world peace requires healing the deep, personal scars left by global conflicts and colonization. It reminds us that international harmony cannot exist while individuals still carry the trauma of systemic violence." Melvin Mak - Jury Statement, 18th Psarokokalo ISFF
Karim Huu Do—a Swiss director of Moroccan and Vietnamese descent—has built his reputation on a rare ability: translating raw emotional tension into poetic, visual dreamscapes. Recognized by Dazed Magazine as one of the world's top new creatives and named New Director of the Year by the Shots awards, Huu Do crafts a provocative visual odyssey in "Ne Me Quitte Pas".nd the shattered feminine psyche reclaims its ancient intuition.
Set against the pivotal backdrop of 1962, the film follows a former Belgian soldier stationed in the Congo and his African beloved as they retreat to a Mediterranean island, seeking a private utopia free from persecution and the haunting weight of history. The result is a captivating cinematic experience balancing hyperreality and dreamscapes, earning the Special Mention for Peace "Irini" at the Psarokokalo ISFF. cture of grief, the creative power of isolation, and what it truly means to step into the "wild."
Interview with Karim Huu Do​
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The Jury noted that true world peace requires healing the deep, personal scars left by colonization. How did you conceptualize "peace" in a narrative where systemic violence and historical trauma pursue the characters even into their most isolated sanctuary?
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The first inspiration for the film was Jacques Brel’s Ne Me Quitte Pas. It’s a song about someone desperately trying to hold on to a person he has, in a sense, already lost. Matthias creates this sanctuary where he believes they can escape what happened, but there is no real peace there because it is built on denial. That became very connected to colonial history for me. Colonization is deeply connected to possession: possessing land, resources, people, and refusing to let go. So I never really thought of Matthias’s island as a place of peace. It is a mirage of peace. Peace begins not with forgetting, but with having the courage to look at the past as it was.
The film is celebrated for its hypnotic visual language, balancing seamlessly between hyperreality and dreamscapes. How did you construct this distinct aesthetic universe?
​I’m not sure I would call it surrealism. The visual language comes from filmmakers who shaped me deeply, like Tarkovsky or Masaki Kobayashi, but also through literature and poetry. I read a lot of writers connected to the Négritude movement—Aimé Césaire was a major influence. There is something visceral in his writing; he found ways of confronting violence and history through language that was extraordinarily beautiful. I wanted to find a way of showing horror through beauty. Césaire has this beautiful line: “La justice écoute aux portes de la beauté” (“Justice listens at the doors of beauty”).
"Peace begins not with forgetting, but with having the courage to look at the past as it was."
Can love serve as a true sanctuary against the crushing weight of history, or does the shadow of colonial violence inevitably bleed into the quietest spaces?
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I do believe in love as a sanctuary—it remains one of the few forces capable of creating something where there was destruction. But love cannot replace truth. That is where Matthias fails. His love for Awa is real, but it is entangled with guilt, trauma, and denial. He wants their love to become his salvation, almost as if loving her deeply enough could erase the world they came from. But there is no outside of history. You have to face the truth first; only then can love help us carry the past without being imprisoned by it.
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How did you treat the physical landscape as a silent third character—one that mirrors the internal tension between freedom, longing, and inescapable memory?​
The Mediterranean setting stands for openness, freedom, and the possibility of beginning again. The Congo sequences move in the opposite direction—I wanted those images to feel dense, humid, and almost claustrophobic, with red earth that feels like the land itself is bleeding. Gradually, that distinction collapses. Fire appears inside this landscape of light. Memory contaminates paradise, demonstrating that Matthias cannot travel far enough to escape what he carries within himself.
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In a contemporary world where displacement remains painfully urgent, what does receiving the Special Mention Irini mean to you?
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Receiving the Irini Special Mention for Peace means a great deal because it tells me that something beyond the film itself reached the jury. We are surrounded by images of war and displacement to the point where information can leave us feeling numb or powerless. Stories can stop that flow for a moment and ask us to stay with one experience, one face, one memory. If Ne Me Quitte Pas makes a few people stop for even one minute and think about the past or another human being, then that already means something to me.
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Author Soultana Koumoutsi