Algeria

Der sensible Träumer Laid lebt in der algerischen Mittelmeerstadt ‘Bejaia’. Er verbringt seine Tage in einem Fotostudio und am Strand mit seinem Freund Nadir. Eines Tages wird er von seiner Schwester aufgefordert, nach Timimoun zurückzukehren und als Ältester die Ehre der Familie wieder herzustellen. Nadir bietet ihm an, ihn auf der abenteuerlichen Reise ins algerische Hinterland zu begleiten…

Der Spielfilm ‘Timimoun’ (2010) von Michael Roes, der zu den bedeutendsten deutschsprachigen Autoren der Gegenwart gehört (‘Rub’ al-Khali – leeres Viertel’), erzählt von der Freundschaft zweier Jungen als Utopie in einem zerrissenen, von religiösen und politischen Spannungen gezeichneten Land. Auf Grundlage des Films entstand auch der Roman ‘Weg nach Timimoun’.Read More »

1516, Legend has it that the king of Algiers had a wife named Zaphira. When the pirate Aroudj Barbarossa arrives to liberate the city from the Spaniards, he is determined to conquer Zaphira as well as the kingdom itself. But is Zaphira willing to let him, or is she plotting for herself?Read More »

Plot: Mademoiselle Boyer, teacher, arrives from mainland France. She triggers passions of love and hatred, and will eventually leave, leaving in the bruised heart of her pupil, little Mouloud, a wound that is forever indelible.Read More »

Quote:
143 RUE DU DESERT is a portrait of Malika, an elderly woman who runs a rest-stop café on the side of National 1, Algeria’s main highway. Through the various patrons who stop for eggs, coffee or tea, we become intimately acquainted with this eccentric woman, whose opinions on a variety of subject matters entertain, enlighten, and baffle in equal measure. Most of the customers know her so well that we suspect they perhaps stop not for the tea, but for her company. The film almost never leaves the inside of her small café, which serves also as her home. However, with every new shot, Ferhani manages to reveal a new fragment of this minuscule space, which keeps the film surprisingly dynamic. Ferhani does not hold sway over Malika’s representation, which is one of the most satisfying elements of the film. Malika seems aware of her character’s cinematic construction, and even dares to contradict statements about her life from one moment to the next, in a scene that is as performative as any fiction. Even though the film provides us with real-time access to this woman’s world, she retains a sense of privacy, which is the main source of the film’s mystery. (Nico Pereda)Read More »

In the cemetery of Sidi Boulekbour, Ali the old gravedigger meets the 60-year-old Johar, who is visiting her sister’s grave for the first time after losing her husband. Johar wants her final resting place to be next to her sister, so she decides to organize her own funeral and asks Ali to help her. But preparations for the final journey go awry when Ali and Johar unexpectedly start to realize they have feelings for each other…Read More »

A team of filmmakers in search of a theme asks young residents of Casablanca about their expectations and their relationship to Moroccan cinema. When they witness a crime committed by a unsatisfied dock worker who accidentally kills his boss, they are interested in this particular case. The investigation of the motifs will encourage them to rethink their conception of cinema and the role of the artist in society.

Morocco’s government banned the film after its first and only screening in Paris, saying it was inappropriate for the Moroccan audience.Read More »

Synopsis and context
Produced by the algerian television, praised by critics but ignored by the audience, Nahla tells the story of Larbi, an algerian journalist who finds himself taken by surprise in the whirlpool of the events of the lebanese civil war, after the battle of Kfar Chouba in january 1975. By shooting Nahla three years later, with a script written with the collaboration of Rachid Boudjedra and Mouny Berrah, Farouk Beloufa says that he looked for a very raw realism in order to develop four stories in one: Larbi’s (the young male journalist), Maha’s and Hind’s (a female journalist and a female activist), and Nahla’s (a female singer). They all assists the construction of the myth of Nahla, the singer adulated by the Arab population. But Nahla loses her voice on stage, the atmosphere of crisis that reigns around her develops like an infection, while Beirut is under the attack of bombs. Larbi, while fascinated at the beginning, loses control, and gets himself in an inextricable situation.Read More »

Quote:
Malek is a reclusive topographer who accepts a commission to survey a remote part of western Algeria in order to extend the electrical grid. He arrives to find the area has been decimated by religious fundamentalists who have only recently cleared out. Malek meets the local police, the shepherds who are beginning to return, and villagers who invite him to a makeshift party. In the middle of the night, he is awakened by the sound of explosions. Not to worry, explains a local man. When the cicadas land in the sand, it’s enough to trigger off the buried booby-traps. But as Malek soon realizes, it isn’t cicadas setting off the mines, but refugees trying to reach the coast and a boat for Spain. The next day he finds a young woman, exhausted and terrified, hiding in a corner of his shack. Malek decides to drive her to the border, and together they set out toward some indeterminate vanishing point on the horizon. These present-day realities are interspersed with flashbacks to the idealistic political debates of his youth, and set against a soundtrack that mixes alternative rock, Nigerian Afrobeat, and Algerian Rai.Read More »

SYNOPSIS
The word bled in Bled Number One, the title of Rabah Ameur-Zaimeche’s follow-up to his well-regarded debut Wesh-Wesh (What’s Going On?) in 2001, translates roughly as Hicksville. Which is precisely where Kamel ends up after being deported from France to Algeria, the land of his fathers, after doing time for robbery.

Bled is a finely observed slice of life shot in a low-key semi-documentary style. The latest in a run of French-made movies dealing with Franco-Algerian cross-currents, it speaks volumes about the conditions of life in today’s Algeria and should play well in festivals and in the Arabic-speaking world.Read More »