We Asked Who is Malik in 2025?

When writer Abdel Raouf Dafri and producer Marco Cherqui come onto Zoom to discuss their series reboot of Jacques Audiard’s 2009 classic A Prophet it is hard to get a question in edgeways as they jostle to tell the story.

They are joined by co-writer Nicolas Peufaillit, who appears accustomed to the pair’s animated back and forth, and pitches in every immediately and again when their rapid-fire accounts subside.

Sixteen years have passed since A Prophet won the Cannes Grand Jury Prize, and was then nominated at the Oscars, while launching its young lead actor Tahar Rahim on the road to stardom, with future credits including The Serpent and The Mauritanian.

The tale of Malik, a young French man of North African descent who lands in jail, where he gains the protection of its Corsican Mafia faction, to then rise up the crime chain, continues to resonate, regularly landing on best film lists and cited by young directors as a source of inspiration.

The original film is mainly associated with Audiard and his long-time producer Pascal Caucheteux at Why Not Productions, but Dafri came up with the original story idea, and first developed the screenplay with Cherqui.  

They remain grateful to Audiard for taking on the story and believing in them as the embarked on their careers, and recognize how he drove the film’s success, but 16 years later they have reappropriated the original idea, updating it for today’s reality.

Cherqui recounts how he and Dafri first bonded when the then emerging writer approached him with his initial idea for A Prophet in the mid-2000s.

“We had two important things in common. We both loved a type of genre cinema with its roots in Coppola and Scorsese, and we also felt that a cinema that better reflected the evolution in French society and its diversity was long overdue,” he says.

“Twenty years ago, cinema was very bourgeois in France, with little place for immigrant voices and faces.”

They other key connection was their migrant roots, which was the source of their desire to shake-up French cinema and TV character codes.

Dafri was born and raised in France to parents of Algerian origin. Cherqui has Jewish-Algerian and Polish ancestry. 

“We both shared this need to treat characters with an immigrant background in a different way, to create a new type of French hero with a different face and voice,” says Cherqui.

They have remained true to this desire in their six-part series reboot, directed by Italy’s Enrico Maria Artale, which premiered Out of Competition at the Venice Film Festival in September. Its set for a broadcast launch on Canal+ early next year , while Studiocanal is continuing international sales at MIPCOM.

Cherqui reveals he has wanted to expand on the universe of A Prophet ever since its Cannes and awards season success.

“For a time, we worked on a mounting a sequel, aiming for the same signature and impact, in the vein of what Coppola did with The Godfather, but Jacques wasn’t into it and Abdel and Nicolas for different reasons didn’t want to get involved in writing a sequel,” says Cherqui.

Dafri, whose early writing credits included dystopian urban drama La Commune for Canal+ as well as Jean-François Richet’s movie double-bill Mesrine 1 and 2, starring Vincent Cassel as the notorious real-life gangster, returned to TV to write Olivier Marchal’s banger police show Braquo.

He also branched into directing with The Breitner Commando, exploring France’s colonial past through the prism of a French colonel who embarks on a violent mission to retrieve the body of another lost colonel during the Algerian War.

Peufaillit went on to write the series bible for groundbreaking French supernational show Les Revenants, with more recent credits including action thriller The Orphans, while Cherqui spearheaded a string of TV shows including banger drama Kabul Kitchen.

The high-end TV wave reignited Cherqui’s desire to revisit A Prophet, with the producer citing the successful series adaptations of feature films such as Fargo and Gomorrah.

“They were two extraordinary shows, which didn’t hurt the original films but rather took elements from the films and treated them in a different way… I said to myself we could do the same thing with A Prophet which is an equally well-known feature.”

Cherqui, Dafri and Peufaillit have stayed true to spirit of the original feature while also adapting to the times.

With the story transposed to a tough sprawling prison in Marseille, one of France’s most multicultural cities, the protagonist is immediately a young African immigrant, serving time for drug smuggling, who is offered the protection of a powerful and shady French-Algerian businessman.

In a new layer, the storyline taps into the fresh embrace of Islam by some youngsters in France with second and third generation migrant roots.

“We didn’t get into it in the film because Jacques wasn’t too keen and it didn’t really talk to him,” says Dafri. “But French people with Algerian origins, who are younger than me, have a closer relationship with religion, and we can’t just pass them off as people from poor neighborhoods who are looking for salvation… it’s also spiritual.”

“It’s not something I’ve embraced, but we had to take it into account. In France, there are places where people used to ‘ca va’ (ok) and immediately they say, ‘Salam Alaykum’ (Peace be with you).”

The religious element is not confined to Islam, with the storyline weaving in Christian beliefs and at points, moments of mysticism.

Malik’s origins have also changed. He no longer has North African roots but instead is a young Black man hailing from the French overseas territory of Mayotte.

“We were asking ourselves., ‘Who is Malik in 2025?’. Who can best embody this survivor,” says Dafri.  “We realized, happily, that the population of Maghreb origin in France has risen up the social ladder and today many are lawyers, doctors, directors, actors, etc…”

Cherqui suggests candidly, using a turn of phrase that is indicative of the upfront debate about race and identity in France, that the country’s Black community is still subject to bias and racism.

“Sorry for putting it like this… but in France, there’s this tendency that when an Arab succeeds, he’s French; when a Black person succeeds, that’s when he becomes French,” he says.

They also explain that giving Malik Mayotte roots also tied in with the religious leitmotifs in the storyline as much of the population is Muslim, while many of France’s former African colonies tend to be predominantly Christian.

The Corsican Mafia, in the meantime, has been replaced by a high-class crime family of Algerian origin.

“The Corsican Mafia is dead,” says Dafri. “The crime bosses in Marseille and Paris today are Arabs, believe me, I know some of them… and in Marseille, in particular, it’s the Algerians who rule.”

First-time actor Mamadou Sidibé stars as Malik, with the cast featuring Sami Bouajila (Days of Glory, A Son), as the shady crime boss; Nailia Harzoune (Haven of Grace, Conviction), as his beautiful and cunning wife, and Moussa Maaskri (Stillwater, Dark Hearts) as a reformed inmate who tries to help the new arrival.

Peufaillit suggests the six-part reboot is more of an ensemble work than the film, which focused mainly on Malik’s journey.

“There are a lot more secondary intrigues and characters, which grow, but at the same time we took care to remain close to Malik’s point of view,” he says.

“What we’re trying to recount in this series, which is also one of the definitions of a prophet, is a person who foretells a change… the series isn’t naturalist, its symbolic.. there’s a lot of magic realism. The characters are symbolic as much as anything. It’s not a documentary about the Marseille crime scene today.”

Cherqui lead produced the series under his CPB Films banner with Sebastien Janin at Media Musketeers Studio, in co-production with UGC Images, Entourage Series, Savon Noir, Staging GmbH, MMBV and DSLR Lucida, with the participation of CANAL+ and Studiocanal.

Shot between Marseille and the Italian region of Puglia, it is executive produced by Fabio Conversi at Bottega Films and Nicola Giuliano at Indigo Film, with the support of the Italian Ministry of Culture and the support of Apulia Film Commission.

As the series gears up for its broadcast launch by Canal+ in early 2026, the trio are mulling a second season, although Cherqui cautions much will depend on how season one is received and financing options.

“We’re thinking about it… the desire is there,” he says. “The final three episodes of season one take us in that direction… we just have to understand where everyone stands and how we would organize it.”