French Montana‘s For Khadija documentary premieres Friday, June 16, at the Tribeca Festival. It captures the sacrifices his single mother made after his family emigrated from Morocco to New York, and the lifestyle he temporarily turned to to help put an end to her suffering: drug dealing.
French tells People it was only a means to an end and not something he planned on doing forever. “I knew that everything I was going to do was going to be out of the ordinary and I would have to sacrifice to get where I needed to go. Sacrificing was me being in the streets, because I hated to see my mother working 12 hours for $100,” he says.
“I knew that after all the sacrificing I was doing, after all the drugs we were selling … that it was going to be a point in time where I would have to stop that. [I would] just use whatever capital to invest into myself, to start the DVDs, or start the rap career,” he continues, noting his drug dealing was done to help his family and work toward his goal of becoming “the first one to break that generation gap.”
French hopes For Khadija shows people that “when it seems like it’s impossible, that there’s a way you could still make it happen.”
Though it focuses primarily on his immigrant story, he says there may be a future documentary that “covers the real s***,” like his rockstar life, the time he crashed, his rehab and his brother’s deportation.
“We’ve got a lot more things to accomplish,” he tells Variety. “There’s always new things with your career, opportunities present themselves every day. But the first doc is like your first album — you cover things that you really want people to see.”
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