The Marseille Miracle

Nura (Mizanur Rahaman) is forced to leave his native Bangladesh in a hurry. He wants to seek asylum in Paris and build a new life with his eight-year-old son, Fahim (Assad Ahmed), before he can join his wife and other children. But no sooner does Nura arrive in France than she is confronted with the harsh reality. Nothing is given here and no one has been waiting for him to offer him a job either. In the weeks and months to come, the man does not manage to integrate. He doesn't learn the language and doesn't understand why he should stick to customs like punctuality. Fahim is quite different, quickly making friends and finding a supporter for his unique chess talent in the grumpy Sylvain (Gérard Depardieu) - one of France's best chess coaches. When Nura is threatened with deportation, it is now up to his son to save the family's livelihood. Because if he wins the Marseille championship and becomes French champion, it could stop the deportation.

Director Pierre François Martin-Laval's The Miracle of Marseille tells a true story based on true events that shows you can't actually be young enough to fight for your dreams. The filmmaker doesn't completely forgo the big emotions, but especially at the beginning he tries to record the difficult everyday life of asylum seekers in a country where they neither understand the language nor know the customs in an authentic and almost sober way. Again and again he spices the whole thing up with a pinch of humour and lightness, which does the film a lot of good given its rather heavy subject matter.

It's nice that Martin-Laval not only pleads here for compassion and helpfulness towards asylum seekers, but that he also shows how important it is to integrate oneself into a country where one wants to live and work. For instance, since Nura, unlike his son, does not use the months of waiting to learn French in order to be able to communicate a little, he also does not notice that his application is sabotaged by an interpreter. And since he is as lax about the concept of punctuality as he is in his homeland, even after several requests, he puts his son's future as a great chess talent at risk.

Assad Ahmed, who plays little Fahim, is the great discovery of the film. He plays with an extreme naturalness with which he easily outplays even an old hand like Gérard Depardieu. The boy makes the drama then really worth watching, although the staging comes across a little too ponderous and at times arguably tough. All in all, The Miracle of Marseille is a nice little movie with a nice story, but you don't necessarily have to go to the cinema for it. But if you're just in the mood for a little dose of feel-good cinema, you won't go wrong with buying a ticket. Worth seeing!

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp