Director
Louisa, in her fifties, puts up missing person posters in search of her daughter, Souad. In a few shots, Fayçal Hammoum portrays a night of wandering through the streets of Algiers. The quest of his heroine—the magnificent Djalila Kadi Hanifi, her face lined by melancholy—underlines the profound divide between the generation of independence and the Algerian youth.
Director
Fayçal Hammoum recounts the 2014 presidential election through non-voting inhabitants of Algiers who, like him, are in their thirties. Be it Bilel, a grocer by default exposed to his customers’ political babbling, or the more politically-charged comments of Younes, a militant FM radio journalist opposed to President Bouteflika’s fourth term, the variety of conversational scenes in no way changes the determination not to vote for an old man who has been invisible for almost two years. The rappers Omar and Brahim are as bereft of hope and voter’s cards as the Tellek webradio DJ, since “the match is fixed”. Moving away from his focus on this subject to film their daily life, the filmmaker draws the portrait of a generation who, as Bilal says with poignant simplicity, “just wants to live
