CAST Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Adel Bencherif, Eda Kateb, Hichem Yacoubi, Jean-Philippe Ricci, Gilles Cohen, Antoine Basler, Leila Bekhti, Pierre Leccia, Foued Nassah, Slimane Dazi SYNOPSIS Winner of the Grand Jury prize at Cannes, and nominated for the best Foreign language film in the 2010 Oscars and BAFTAs, the French film Un Prophète tells the story of the functionally illiterate Malik El Djebena (Rahim), a marginalised youth abandoned by his family who is sentenced to six years in an adult prison. He is half Arab and half Corsican, at one moment full of bravado and at another naive and is recruited by Cesar (Arestrup) the Corsican prison gang leader. His first, proving mission is to kill Reyeb (Yacoubi), the primary step in his informal and informal gaol education of becoming a master criminal in his own right and achieving some sort of hero status. Audiard convincingly and tensely establishes the characters, the geography of the prison itself and prison life with its corruption, discrimination, survival skills and ambition. Violent and full of surprises as Malik's steep learning curve includes much more than learning to read and write. Audiard's film makes no moral judgments as Malik juggles his conscience and turns every card into a trump. PRESS 'Harrowing but ultimately uplifting, The Shawshank Redemption looks like very thin soup in comparison' - The Daily Mirror