يا جميلة قوليلي لوكان نموت كيفاه تديري ؟
Tell me, Djamila, if I die, how will you do?
El Ghorba, exile in Algerian Arabic, is where men go, women rarely. An uncertain, interior place, far from the land, far from the mother as well, a point that hurts here and there, across generations. El Ghorba has a reverse side, that of the women who remain, and wait, from generation to generation, on both sides. This story is that of the women in my family, kept silent for too long, an echo of my own story. This film lets us hear their stories poetically, in Setif, that of my grandmother Djamila who tells the departure and absence of her first son, my father. We women, on both sides of the Mediterranean, how have we been marked by what Abdelmalek Sayad calls "the double absence", here and there? How did we reweave links beyond the rupture of exile?
Creative documentary film, May 2019, 33 min.
Direction, image, sound : Leïla Saadna
Editing: Linda Attab
Production: Collectif Cinéma et Mémoire (Algeria) and Association Kaïna Cinéma (France)
This film was made thanks to the Documentary Film Creation Workshop, Timimoun, 2017-2019.
Festivals and screenings :
June/2019 - Premiere at the Cinémathèque d'Alger - Algeria
July/2019 - Screening at the Cinémathèque de Tizi-Ouzou - Algeria
July/2019 - Festival Racont'art - Algeria
August/2019 - 42nd Douarnenez Film Festival - France
September/2019 - 17th Rencontres Cinématographiques de Bejaïa - Algeria
December/2019 - Ecrans courts d'Aflam - Marseille - France
December/2019 - Journées du Film Citoyen - Tlemcen - Algeria
January/2020 - Université pour tous, Les Glycines - Algiers - Algeria
January/2020 - Festival Maghreb si loin si proche - Argelès - France
March/2020 - Festival PCMMO Panorama des Cinémas du Maghreb et du Moyen Orient, Saint-Denis, France.
November/2020 - Festival Olhares do Mediterrâneo - Women's Film Festival, Lisbon, Portugal (Online screening due to the health crisis, on the website: https://www.filmin.pt/)
November/2020 - Private screening during Sylvie Blocher's seminar "Arc Plate-forme Expérimentale", Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Arts de Paris-Cergy – France