Ansamed

(ANSAmed) - PARIS, AUGUST 27 - A Caesar for the best actor and a Caesar for the most promising male, best European Actor of 2009, for his highly-praised role in the film 'The Prophet' by Jacques Audiard. Tahar Rahim is now shooting his fourth full-length film, 'Les Hommes Libres' directed by Ismael Ferroukhi, who was also behind the other success, 'The Voyage'.

The director tells of how he first chose the actor before The Prophet had been planned at Cannes in May 2009: ''as soon as I saw him in a bar I knew that he was it: my actor''.

From the prison inferno of The Prophet, to the destructive passion of ''Chienne'' directed by Lou Ye, to Kevin MacDonald's ''The Eagle of the Ninth'' with Jamie Bell, (neither of them yet known), the actor, born in Belfort 29 years ago to parents of Algerian origins, has shown no fear of hopping between genres.

For Ferroukhi's film, Younes is a young Algerian trying to survive in German-occupied Paris. A small-time black market dealer who meets up with historic figures of the period such as Jewish singer of Arabic-Andalusian music Salim Halali (Mahmud Shalaby) or Kaddour ben Ghabrit, the rector of Paris' mosque (Michael Londsdale) who, a little known event of the period, sheltered Jews from persecution.

Once filming is over at the beginning of October, Tahar Rahim will be setting off for the south of Tunisia where he will film ''Black Thirst'' by Jean Jacques Annaud, from a novel by the Swiss writer Hans Ruesch, with Antonio Banderas, a thriller on a war between two countries in an imaginary Arab region during the 1930s. (ANSAmed).