The fighting women Particia Pisters

The fighting women of New Algerian Cinema Particia Pisters

Algeria’s civil war of 1992-1999 is also called ‘The war without images’. Cameras were forbidden by all the fundamentalist movements. In 1993, when director Merzak Allouache was filming Bab el Oued City, he could never use the same location twice, and he had to smuggle the footage out of the country. After that, it became impossible to shoot any films in Algeria. The war ended in 1999 with the introduction of the Law on Civil Concorde, a kind of general armistice which demanded a ceasefire for all sides who, as an incentive, were allowed to return to their communities without punishment. For President Bouteflika, this was the only way to restore peace. It was this development which meant that people’s stories went unheard in the official version of history.

The slowly recovering film industry is now playing an important role in allowing these unofficial stories and traumatic memories of war to be heard. And, in new Algerian cinema, it is women’s voices which are perhaps the most striking In 2002, Yasmina Bachir-Chouikh’s Rachida, one of the first films about the violence of the 1990s, told the story of a young teacher who gets stabbed by an ex-student. the Suspects (2004), hamlet of women (2005) and Barakat! (2006) show the different ways women armed themselves against the horrible terror and fear which held the country in its grip for a very long time. In the Suspects, Samia, a psychiatrist, is working on her book about trauma assimilation of ex-soldiers from the War of Independence, with a clear parallel with the trauma of the civil war. In hamlet of women, all the women in a village are armed, and they invent several ways — such as weaving straw men to act as watchman — to protect themselves from terrorists. In Barakat! two women are on the search for one of their missing husbands. Their resistance is not just expressed through their persistent search, but also in the eventual refusal of the spiral of violence. What’s striking, too, is that all films end with women looking directly into the camera, as if to say that through their experiences, they are looking history in the eye while at the same time passing on hope for the future.

In the Suspects en Barakat! memories of the French-Algerian war are relived. In Barakat! this initially leads to an intergenerational conflict between Amel en Khadisja, when Amel blames the old generation of liberators for making the current generation of young people choose between ‘plague and cholera’, i.e. French occupation or Algerian terror. Gradually, we also get to hear about Khadisha’s own struggle and lost ideals. We realise that the huge efforts on the part of women in the War of Independence is never included in official — patriarchal — history. Many more new films, and even more public debates, are needed to give justice to all these women’s experiences and battles on so many fronts.