Algériennes, Trente ans après
In 1966, four years after the independence of Algeria. Ahmed Lallem directed "Elles", a documentary that gave the floor to first and final year high school girls in Algiers. Thirty years later, the director has found some of them: Souad, Farida, Hassina or Badra, beautiful, touching, intelligent women, who tell us about their lives, their choices, and remember their adolescence. Adolescence where high school constituted a freedom from the traditional family environment, a privilege for a girl to whom the State did not guarantee the right to education in the face of the law of patriarchy: when a pupil was withdrawn from school to be married, the state let things happen. Not content with having obtained the baccalaureate, Souad and Hassina, they faced their father to be able to continue their studies. First clashes... Thirty years later, these are mature and emancipated women who speak to us: "The Algerian woman moans, sometimes threatens, but rarely speaks. Despite everything, we want to talk because we have to". They talk. Those who left, those who stayed. They evoke those thirty years: hope, stubbornness, life, renunciations, Islamic fundamentalism and the family code. And their eyes and their smiles say a lot when they talk about the little nephews who come home from school telling their mothers, their aunts, that they must wear the hijab, stay at home and not drive the car. automobile. A tragic change for these women, for whom knowledge and the education of thought were and remain at the heart of life. Through their different paths, this film explores the complexity of the lives of Algerian women, their disappointments but also their combativeness, through, as a backdrop, the last thirty years of Algerian history.
- Released
- 1996
Details
Release year: 1996
Storyline
In 1966, four years after the independence of Algeria. Ahmed Lallem directed "Elles", a documentary that gave the floor to first and final year high school girls in Algiers. Thirty years later, the director has found some of them: Souad, Farida, Hassina or Badra, beautiful, touching, intelligent women, who tell us about their lives, their choices, and remember their adolescence. Adolescence where high school constituted a freedom from the traditional family environment, a privilege for a girl to whom the State did not guarantee the right to education in the face of the law of patriarchy: when a pupil was withdrawn from school to be married, the state let things happen. Not content with having obtained the baccalaureate, Souad and Hassina, they faced their father to be able to continue their studies. First clashes... Thirty years later, these are mature and emancipated women who speak to us: "The Algerian woman moans, sometimes threatens, but rarely speaks. Despite everything, we want to talk because we have to". They talk. Those who left, those who stayed. They evoke those thirty years: hope, stubbornness, life, renunciations, Islamic fundamentalism and the family code. And their eyes and their smiles say a lot when they talk about the little nephews who come home from school telling their mothers, their aunts, that they must wear the hijab, stay at home and not drive the car. automobile. A tragic change for these women, for whom knowledge and the education of thought were and remain at the heart of life. Through their different paths, this film explores the complexity of the lives of Algerian women, their disappointments but also their combativeness, through, as a backdrop, the last thirty years of Algerian history.