The film was born of a friendship between Yann Demange and Alexandre Mattiussi (Founder and Creative Director, AMI), there was this strong desire to produce a genuine cinema story.

DAMMI is a journey. A journey through the mind. Such as the thought that circulates by itself, from fortuitous correspondences to associations of ideas, the film relies on ellipses, breaks in tone and rhythm to circulate from memories to dreamlike images, from metaphorical visions to fragments of the present. But it is also a journey through contemporary Paris and its North-East areas as the film visits the most important places in the life of Demange’s father.

Yann Demange and Riz Ahmed are long-time friends and have worked together in the past and the conversation about their complex identities has been part of their friendship for a long time. He was starting to realize the film was going to be very personal, and he needed someone he could trust.

Yann also chose to cast his own father in his own role. He reconnected with his father in France when he was 13. He’d always associated the city with him and two of his brothers who stayed and were raised in Paris: his father moved to France at 18 from Algiers, and whenever he came to visit, and he spend time in the several cafés his father owned over the years… These are all images that belong to Yann’s past, his childhood, and that can be found in the film in the form of dreamlike memories.