The comedian is back this Friday on the streaming platform, in a dark series of which she is the creator, the main actress, the screenwriter, the producer and the director.
Nawell Madani changes tone. The Belgian comedian, who had told his career in comedy That’s all for me (2017), is back this Friday with So far, so good, a series imagined for Netflix. Exit the usual jokes, we are here in an atmosphere closer to thriller and thriller.
Presented by Nawell Madani as a reflection on “the responsibility of information”, this series follows Fara, a journalist whose dream of presenting the newspaper of a non-stop news channel is slowed down when she helps her brother escape the police, putting his family in the crosshairs of a drug lord.
Valiant heroines
Originally titled Tape (“slums” in slang), the series was born during confinement, from the desire to talk about suburban women, still too represented on the screen. “I had two films in writing. Then as the confinement lasted longer than expected, I started writing this series”, she recalls.
“When I started writing, I didn’t want to slow myself down, set myself limits,” she continues. “I wanted to bring strong things to life for my heroines. I wanted them to be courageous, determined, valiant. For that, you needed a lever of fiction, which the thriller offers. And I had a blast.” Netflix was immediately packed.
Its heroine, Fara, is surrounded by several strong women, all inspired by her sisters and the women around her. “I wanted to talk about the mental load, the complexity of transmission, whether religious or cultural.” “All of these characters want to get out of this and protect the family.”
Infiltrated in BFMTV
For the purposes of writing So far, so good, Nawell Madani visited the premises of BFMTV. “They really played the game,” she says. “I was able to ask a lot of questions. It was really cool. I asked them why, when I was walking around the premises, there weren’t many Arabs and black people.”
“They explained to me that they did not receive as many applications as they would like, that some young journalists did not push the door of this type of media. And that there was a real failure on their part”, she adds.
She visited the editorial office for half a day: “I did all the steps: how to create a banner, how the news arrives, how to keep up with the times when news arrives, how to check it, how we verify it with little information. It was very rewarding.”
Creator, actress, screenwriter, producer and director of So far, so good, Nawell Madani supervised the series in every detail. “I had a hard time finishing this series,” she says. Especially since she had just given birth. “Playing and having to watch yourself on the screen, after a pregnancy, it takes time (to adapt).”
The most difficult was the pace of filming, very different from that of the cinema. “Bringing in 7-9 useful minutes a day, I didn’t know that rhythm. And then being in acting, directing, writing, producing and showrunning, frankly, the costume was too big. Clearly, we had all underestimated the workload.”
“I dream of making an action movie!”
Met a few days before the broadcast of the series, Nawell Madani confesses to being “scared”. “I don’t know how it’s going to be on April 7. I can’t sleep anymore. You should know that with a platform like Netflix, we go out worldwide in 190 countries. And we’re compared to giants like paper house et Squid Game.”
“We don’t have the same budgets, but we are the poster next door, people go from a French series to a Korean series. You have to be a little up to it”, worries- She.
The end of the series does not call for a second season. But Nawell Madani is now thinking about his next projects. “I dream of making an action film!” she exclaims. “I want to jump from one roof to another! This is my next challenge.”
The one who has just opened her stand-up club in Belgium promises “an action film with chat, emotion”, because she “likes to make you cry a little.” The difficult filming of his series gave him the weapons to take up this challenge: “what I experienced with So far, so good will make it easier to shoot feature films.”
