Welcome to Marly-Gomont: what happened to Kamini?

His biopic, Welcome to Marly-Gomont, will be rebroadcast this weekend on TF1.

Being black and living in a Picardy village of 445 inhabitants; being a country person and doing rap: these are the paradoxes exposed by Kamini in his humorous hit “Marly-Gomont”, released in 2006. Although he was a success, ten years later, the country rapper had fallen into oblivion. At least, that's what we imagined, until his story was brought to the cinema in Welcome to Marly-Gomontwhich will be broadcast Sunday evening on TF1.

The trailer for Welcome to Marly-Gomont by Julien Rambaldi:

So what happened to Kamini?

Born on December 8, 1979 in Nouvion-en-Thiérache, Kamini Zantoko for the civil status is the son of a general practitioner who left the Republic of Congo to settle in Marly-Gomont, a small village lost in the Aisne.

This is the story that the one who calls himself Kamini tells in “Marly-Gomont”. The humorous title in which he raps about his life in a village where no one has ever seen a black person, does not convince the record companies. But quickly, “Marly-Gomont” makes the rounds of the Web and Kamini establishes himself as one of the first buzzes of the 2.0 era. A few months later, he is crowned at the Victoires de la Musique for the music video in which he declaims “I'm not from the city, But the beat is good, I'm not from Paris, But from Marly Gaumont”.

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Despite his platinum record and 20 million views on YouTube, the rapper in the yellow chick T-shirt has not managed to break into music. A few attempts at singles – ““I'm white”, “A little motherfuck”, “Because we're stupid” – and here is the rural rapper forgotten.

But Kamini never stopped believing in it.

After hosting local television shows and participating in dubbing projects, the man who confided in PureCharts that “Marly-Gomont had brought him a lot of money” that he had “invested in real estate” took the time to work on a one-man show and to get his feet wet by touring the university restaurants in France.

His big project is in the cinema, with Welcome to Marly-Gomont, which has intrigued more than 500,000 cinema-goers. In this bittersweet comedy, of which he is co-writer, Kamini pays tribute to his father, who died in a car accident in 2009. Welcome to Marly-Gomont tells the story of Seyolo Zantoko, a Congolese doctor who leaves Kinshasa to settle in a medical desert in the North of France, finding himself confronted with racism and the distrust of the villagers, whose trust he must gain. Seyolo Zantoko's father Kamini is played by Marc Zinga (May Allah bless France, 007 Spectre)and it's Aïssa Maiga who embodies his mother. Kamini did the voiceover for the film he sold in 2012 during the Film Market from Cannes and that he presents as “The love story between two different cultures, a village and a family, a village and its doctor.”

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Since the film's release, Kamini released a song in June 2018 titled “Eul'Vraie France”. Parodying the trap style in fashion in France (PNL, MHD), he offered a new title on rural France, more bitter than Marly-Gomont. Extract : “No trendy club? Eul'Vraie France! Fear of foreigners? Eul'Vraie France! National Front in the lead? Eul'Vraie France! Welcome to the rural world, where nothing happens. We only talk about your place if there's a scandal, a brutal crime that borders on madness.”

In addition to pursuing his musical career, Kamini has recently appeared again as an actor: in 2021, he participated in the hit France Télévisions series, Such a big sun.