French Montana Talks 'Sacrifice' of 'Being in the Streets' at 18: 'I Had Serious Family Problems' (Exclusive)

The "Unforgettable" rapper spoke to PEOPLE ahead of the Tribeca Festival premiere of his new documentary, 'For Khadija'

Before French Montana was a Grammy-nominated rapper, he was a boy who immigrated from Morocco to the Bronx, New York with his family and needed to figure out a way to turn his life around — so he turned to selling drugs.

Montana's documentary For Khadija premieres Friday at the Beacon Theatre in New York City during Tribeca Festival, and the film shows the rapper's remarkable rise to fame and his mother who sacrificed everything to raise her three sons after their family was abandoned by Montana's father.

The "Unforgettable" rapper's upbringing was nothing short of a challenge. From getting rejected from university scholarships for being undocumented to becoming a drug dealer to help his struggling mother provide for the family, Montana still maintains that these obstacles are what turned him into the person he is today.

"The greatness start after your comfort zone," Montana, 38, tells PEOPLE. "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."

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"I knew that after all the sacrificing I was doing, after all the drugs we were selling, after all the sacrifices we was taking, 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 adds.

In the documentary, he explains that selling drugs gave him a luxury he never had access to before — but it wasn't long before it caught up to him, and he ended up in the hospital after getting shot. Nonetheless, he always knew he had a bigger purpose.

"I knew I was working towards something. I wasn't just a dumb-ass drug dealer that was just doing all this because I wanted to buy a car to get a girl or this and that. I knew I had serious family problems, that I needed to break the chain," Montana says.

The star adds, "I needed to do something for my family, and honestly just become the first one to break that generation gap."

He also knew that he didn't want to see his mom — whom the documentary is named after — suffer.

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"The more you learn, the less you bleed. I think that I just had my mother in the back of my mind when I walked in on her and she was just crying and praying," he said. "She was basically crying for help, and I was just like, 'Yo, let me try and help.' And I think that was one of the moments that made me just start taking chances, because I knew I was doing it for the right thing."

Montana hopes that this documentary, which he started working on in 2017 after taking his mom back to her home in Morocco for the first time in over two decades, teaches viewers that "miracles do happen."

"When it seems like it's impossible, that there's a way you could still make it happen," he says. "You just got to let go, man, and have faith, like how my mother did in the documentary. She prays, and how I did, when I had to make a choice, whether I was just going to get caught up with seeing my mother sacrifice, or I was going to do something about it and make a change."

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