Born in Cuba to African slaves, Rafael Padilla battled racism to become the toast of bourgeois Paris, feted by the rich and powerful for his performances as “Chocolat the clown”, France’s first black celebrity.
Almost a century after he was laid to rest in a mass grave in the French capital, his largely forgotten story is told in Roschdy Zem's Chocolat. The film was screened at the FrancOfilm festival in Abu Dhabi and Dubai last month, and will now receive its North American premiere.
It is a bold choice to open the Colcoa (City of Lights, City of Angels) film festival, the world's largest festival of French film, which began on Monday in Los Angeles and runs until Tuesday. Chocolat challenges audiences to consider whether Hollywood's notorious diversity problem is also an issue in France.
The US film industry has been facing a backlash over its lack of prominent stars from ethnic minorities, exemplified by February’s Oscars, which for a second year running featured no black nominees for acting awards.
In marked contrast, a record number of ethnic minorities competed in major categories at the French equivalent of the Oscars, the Césars, this year.
Underlining the issue, the Center for African-American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles published a damning Hollywood Diversity Report 2016 in February.
It found that actors from ethnic minorities filled only 12.9 per cent of lead roles in 163 films released in 2014, down from 16.7 per cent the year before and 15.1 per cent in 2012.
But minority filmmakers and actors involved in films screening during the nine-day festival believe the Césars’s apparent diversity may be masking the true situation in French film.
Chocolat is led by rising star Omar Sy, the first Frenchman of African descent to win a best actor César, for his role in 2011's The Intouchables. He has converted his popularity in the francophone world into a Hollywood career, with roles in Marvel comic-book movie X-Men: Days of Future Past in 2014 and the 2015 blockbuster dino-sequel Jurassic World.
The 38-year-old points to Denzel Washington, Wesley Snipes, Dwayne Johnson and other ethnic-minority actors in the US who have found fame despite the bleak picture outlined by UCLA’s diversity report.
Non-white actors have traditionally been denied leading roles in certain genres, including romantic comedy and superhero movies, but Sy says studios producing global blockbusters, at least, are increasingly trying “to pluck people from all areas of the world”.
Shot on a budget of €18.5 million (Dh76.8m), Chocolat has been lauded by critics for shining a light on a subject which is more of a taboo in French society than in Hollywood. A review in the Hollywood Reporter said the film deserved "plenty of credit for using this kind of commercial vehicle to look French racism in the face and call it what it is".
In France, it is forbidden by law even to collect statistics referring to “racial or ethnic origin”, so any discussion of diversity is necessarily anecdotal – but Sy suspects the problem is as great as it is in Hollywood.
“We have a track record of actors and directors from diverse backgrounds being given awards – but if you look at production as a whole, they are not there,” Sy said while appearing at Colcoa.
Chocolat writer and director Zem felt the problem acutely when looking big name actors to bolster his film – only Sy emerged as a credible choice.
“I needed a recognised actor of colour and there was only one name in the frame,” he says.
Colcoa’s focus on diversity is evident in its world-cinema section, which features two of the most talked-about films from Muslim countries.
Directors and producers around the world protested against a ban by Morocco on Nabil Ayouch's French-Moroccan drama Much Loved, a candid take on prostitution that provoked death threats against actress Loubna Abidar.
Ayouch says that even when minorities do get prominent roles in French cinema, they are often typecast, playing stereotypes that reinforce prejudice.
"If we want to present a son-in-law to parents, we will make a joke out of it by making him black or Arab," he says, referring to last year's comedy Serial (Bad) Weddings. "A cop will be black or Arab if he lives in the housing projects."
But Mohamed Hamidi, whose comedy One Man and his Cow tells the story of a farmer who dreams of winning an agricultural show, says the status of minorities in French cinema is improving. His film, he says, follows a strong slate of recent French features led by black or North African actors, including Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra (2002) and Welcome to the Sticks (2008) .
“You only have to look at the big successes of the past 20 years ... I think the French are largely there,” he says.
•Chocolat screens from tomorrow at Vox Cinemas Mall of the Emirates in Dubai and Yas Mall in Abu Dhabi. Visit www.voxcinemas.com for more details
