L’Année du Maghreb (Jun 2025)

« Comment être un homme sensible dans un univers violent ? »

  • Camille Leprince

DOI
https://doi.org/10.4000/145if
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 33

Abstract

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Twenty years after the end of the “black decade”, Abou Leila (2019, 135’), an unclassifiable fiction film by Amin Sidi-Boumédiène, who was 36 then, appears on screens. It is part of a movement common to the revival of Algerian cinema, which tackles the highly sensitive issue of the civil war of the 1990s while defending demanding artistic visions. This filmmaker proposes a radical approach to this political issue, flirting with different genres. From western to horror film, road movie to thriller, he subversively directs a duo of policemen following the trail of a mysterious terrorist known as “Abou Leila” through the desert in the south of the country. This journey will reveal in each of the two characters a masculinity weakened by traumas from which Algeria struggles to recover. Through its formal inventiveness and intellectual complexity, the film breaks away from the official interpretation of the war imposed by the regime but without claiming it. In Abou Leila, the dichotomy between “good guys” and “bad guys” becomes blurred, as porosity to violence allows the raw humanity of beings caught up in the turmoil of History to emerge, embodied here in two policemen friends who at first seem to have nothing in common. In the end, these men gradually demonstrate a shared vulnerability, creating sensitive male figures and challenging gender stereotypes. To revisit Amin Sidi-Boumédiène’s career through this interview is to question the outcome of such a work, which is synonymous with the audacity of young Algerian cinema.As a child, before satellites and the Internet appeared, cinema was more of a fantasy object to him. Few films were available on Algerian television then, apart from the national canon of cinema from the 1960s—1970s, which ranged from historical frescoes to burlesque fiction. His family living abroad provided him with film magazines, feeding his imagination and frustration. Then, when Canal + arrived, following his older brother’s example, he watched and re-watched every possible film, regardless of author or genre. Destined for higher education, which he began in France, he eventually carved out his own path by studying cinema, wanting to learn the more concrete and technical aspects of the director’s craft. At the same time, he forged his own artistic culture by frequenting media libraries, which introduced him to the great masters of cinema. To this day, however, he claims to draw more inspiration from literature and philosophy than cinema. From the influence of Nietzsche to that of Arab philosophers, and from the Beat Generation to the magic realism of the South Americans, or Algerian literature to science fiction, his cinema soon turns to fiction and takes on an element of the fantastic.The man who never considered making a documentary says he needs to construct a fictional narrative to express the world’s complexity from several points of view while respecting a certain truth. Skirting the boundaries between reality and fiction remains what he enjoys most. While making his first films in France, he realized that his approach was dry and abstract, and in 2008, he felt the need to return to Algeria as his main shooting ground. Helping to set up the Thala Films production company, he joined a workshop that produced his first short film, Demain, Alger? in 2011. He takes as its subject an event that marked his childhood: the revolt and repression of “October 88” while avoiding a didactic reading and preferring to open up avenues of reflection through the faces and destinies of young people facing History in the making. He then became aware f the birth of a new Algerian cinema and decided to contribute to it by joining forces with other collectives and, above all, other individuals, but always following his own path, which defies anyone to reduce his creation to a particular genre, as witnessed by the audacity of Abou Leila and his reflection on the anthropological significance of images in limit situation when nightmare contaminates reality.

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