This is Not a French Film

Tom Adjibi / Belgium & France / 2026 / World Premiere / 80 min

Tom is an actor and fed up with being offered the same roles over and over again. With his Belgian-Beninese background, he is only offered clichéd roles that are mostly about his skin colour and hair. Therefore, he decides to make his own film. He wants to challenge the norms and cast only non-white actors, who will develop the story together at a country house in the south of France.

Tom hires a film crew to document the process, but is quickly confronted with the blind spots in his own idea – and with his lack of experience – by the actors he has chosen himself. ‘This is not a French Film’ is a phenomenally entertaining and politically punchy film that keeps taking you by surprise. Tom Adjibi has staged his own experiences from the film world as a wild, unpredictable and disarmingly (self-)ironic tale about power, representation and how much can actually go wrong when making a film. Which is really quite a lot. The colonial legacy gets a proper slap in the face along the way.