Sara Sadik Turns GTA Graphics Into Portraits of France's Muslim Youth

Sara Sadik's film Khtobtogone (2021), made with the graphics of Grand Theft Auto V, is currently on view in two museum shows: "Beyond the Manosphere: Masculinities Today" at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen through January 2027, and "Harder Better Faster Stronger – Are Men OK?" at Fotografiska in Stockholm through February 2027. That a work built on clunky game engine visuals can travel this far tells you something about what's underneath the pixels.

The film follows Zine, a young food delivery driver in love, torn between romantic devotion and loyalty to the friends who have protected him in a hostile world. "They say love comes at you when you least expect it. I swear, I'd almost given up. But I actually fell madly in love, again," Zine says in one scene, watching the sun set over the water in an Adidas tracksuit and a Gucci crossbody bag.

Sadik, born in Bordeaux and trained at the École supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux before moving to Marseille, makes films about the intimate lives of young French Muslim men and teenagers. Her tools are video games, 3D software, and 360-degree cameras that mimic game camerawork. Her method is more old-fashioned: workshops and long conversations.

How does she actually build these films?

The mechanism starts with people. Each commission begins with choosing whom to work with — a school, a social center, a juvenile detention center, or a single person. Her first Marseille workshop involved teenagers who, she told ARTnews's Shanti Escalante-De Mattei in a Link Rot interview, opened up because she was an outsider: "Because I was an outsider, they felt very comfortable sharing these stories with me and asking for advice."

The most common subject was romantic love, followed by mental health — depression and daily sadness the boys rarely raised with parents or friends. The teenagers reminded her of her little brother, an absent presence in her work. Sadik's father is Moroccan, her mother Algerian, and she describes her background as working-class. "The stories [of this community] are not represented," she said.

Khtobtogone came together after Ahmed Ra'ad Al Hamid followed her on Instagram by mistake. They became friends with a "big-sister, little-brother dynamic," and he sent her voice notes about his love story and daily life. She worked with Diego Grandry, a mods creator and image director, to build characters, clothes and accessories specific to French culture, using the game's cinema mode — a technique she picked up from a YouTube trend of French rap videos remade in GTA 5.

What does the reception of Khtobtogone bother her?

The film's success irritated Sadik. Audiences embraced its vulnerable, heartsick protagonist a little too comfortably. "I'm happy that you like seeing this guy being super vulnerable and sad, wanting to die. These teenagers and young men I work with, yes, they are vulnerable and have love stories, but they also have real fucking problems," she said. "They're vulnerable, but they're also fighters. They are hungry; they find ways of resisting."

Her response was Ultimate Vatos: Force and Honor (2022), recently screened at the 3HD Festival in Berlin, which examines loyalty and obedience in masculine spaces — including the French army, which she says recruits teenagers through annual Call of Duty campaigns.

Her newest work, TALS&TALOS MARKETPLACE (2026), on view at Le Large on Île Seguin through March 2027, tackles the gamification of job hunting. It follows two 17-year-old vocational students training as autobody mechanics who struggle to find work due to discrimination. Sadik describes how the state employment platform France Travail uses VR and job simulator games, with candidates waiting from eight in the morning to six in the evening to be hired while recruiters compare profiles "like on Tinder." "They're treated like products," she said. Her earlier Crystal Zastruga (2023) dealt with grief.

What is she doing about the Paris protests?

Away from France since the youth movement began, Sadik has followed events on TikTok — and started archiving what she saw. She now holds roughly 1,000 videos documenting the protests, including evidence of police violence that platforms keep deleting. "Maybe in five years someone will need them for something," she said.

She wasn't surprised by the movement itself. She'd seen the unsanitary school conditions and the discrimination in university admissions after the baccalaureate. "I didn't think they would start this movement, but it doesn't surprise me, they have a right to do this," she said. "I respect the complaints and I'm proud of them."