Henry Gamble, News Editor—
The third annual installment of the Middle Eastern Film Festival at Denison kicked off on Thursday, February 2nd, with the screening of Their Algeria (2020). The viewing was accompanied by a Q&A with Professor Isabelle Choquet of the French and Modern Languages Department.
Their Algeria is a documentary-style film, which follows the lives of two Algerian immigrants in France, as they divorce after decades of marriage.
Directed by their granddaughter, Lina Soualem, Their Algeria is an attempt to finally unpack years of loss and trauma endured by her grandparents through their initial journey to France and hardships once they had arrived.
Choquet explained that Soualem is forced to use her medium to facilitate these difficult conversations, as the presence of the camera allows her to create a more indirect line of communication with her oftentimes unforthcoming grandparents.
Along with the sense of loss, Soualem additionally highlights the various coping mechanisms used by her grandparents to avoid touching on painful memories.
Throughout the film, her grandmother’s distinct laughter and her grandfather’s deep silence, cut with incomprehensible tangents, demonstrate the extent of the suppression.
Choquet said that “she [Soualem] uses several strategies to overcome this silence several times, first she shows pictures, and then different recordings from the past, it’s not until she begins to ask and show pictures of her great-grandparents, that the silence begins to break.”
At the very end of the film, her grandfather can be finally seen smiling and speaking to Soualem more openly, as she returns from a long journey home to the village where her grandparents had once lived in Algeria.
The conversations being had in this film are very similar to those being had on a larger and international scale, explained Choquet. “Just recently, French President Emmanuel Macron made a diplomatic trip to Algiers, as conversations and acknowledgments about the brutal realities of French colonization and the Algerian War are becoming less taboo.”
In a broader context, the questions posed by Soualem about cultural loss and assimilation through immigration are never answered, yet they promote deep reflections in both Soualem and her family, who finally come face to face with their complicated and painful histories.
Choquet used a quote from an interview with Soualem to capture the complexity of her heritage, “My grandparents spent sixty years of their life in France, but they’re not French, They couldn’t go back to Algeria but they feel Algerian.” If a new understanding would be pulled from the film, Choquet thinks that the complexity of identity is exemplified as a truly intricate puzzle, and certainly not as the binary issue it tends to be categorized as.
The Middle Eastern Film Festival continues with the screening of Our River, Our Sky (2021), in Herrick Hall at 6 pm on Feb. 6th.