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After starting out in Paris as a graphic designer and first assistant director on advertising and film shoots, Didier D. Daarwin returned to his hometown of Marseille in the early 1990s to be part of the vibrant cultural scene. With Stéphan Muntaner, he founded the collective "Tous des K," a veritable graphic commando that left a lasting mark on the aesthetics of French rap. The duo supported IAM's rise to fame by designing album covers, visual identities, and music videos: "Having started out making videos with my Super 8 camera for my cold wave band, I immediately understood, when I met the group, that they were going to leave their mark on the world of hip-hop. At the time, their level of maturity and professionalism was already astonishing." It was during this period that he traded his identity for a pseudonym chosen by the rappers: “I’m the first in my family to be born on French soil, as my parents are from Algeria and Morocco. The guys from IAM kept teasing me because they didn’t want to believe my real name was Didier Derouin. They changed it to Daarwin.” Close to Akhenaton, they co-founded the production company Alamût Prodz. In 2008, they wrote and co-directed Conte de la Frustration (Tale of Frustration), a TV movie filmed entirely in Marseille. Since then, their company has produced more than two hundred music videos and numerous commercials, while developing a notable body of fiction work, from the documentary Marseille Capitale Rap to the horror feature film Mastemah, released in theaters in 2022. Never short of projects, Didier will return to the sets in a few months to sign a new cinematic adventure, the script of which we are eager to discover.
