Breaking Clichés: A Powerful French Film Explores Homosexuality in North African Communities

This “cliché breaker”, as he likes to present himself, has struck again: this time, it is at the Francophone film festival in Angoulême, in the south of France, where his sixth feature film, “L’ sea ​​air makes you free”, was presented in competition on Saturday.

Six years after “Lola Pater” – a film with Fanny Ardant in the role of a trans woman of North African origin who tries to reconnect with her son – he returns with a story of homosexuality, still in a family of origin Maghrebian.

The story of an arranged marriage, supposed to +arrange+ two families: that of Saïd, who sees in this union a way of masking the homosexuality of one of its members. And that of Hadjira, who has had trouble with the law and who sees in this union a way to redeem some respectability.

The film also questions society’s view of homosexuals from North African immigration.

“When a boy of Arab, Muslim origin searches for himself and types in a search engine + gay Arab +, he will come across pornographic images, obscenities. From the outset, he is terrified because he tells himself that it is how the majority perceives it”, explains the director.

“It is complicated”

Telling about this minority — from which he comes, he who was born in Paris in 1966 (four years after Independence) to Algerian parents — is fairly recent in his filmography, which began in 2000 with “Le Harem de Madame Osmane” and anchored in the Maghreb.

Not a blockbuster filmmaker, his films, including “Viva Laldjérie” or “Goodbye Morocco”, are critically acclaimed and exceed 100,000 admissions at the box office almost every time.

In 2007, his film “Délice Paloma”, a burlesque allegory on the corruption affecting Algeria, was prevented from being released on the spot, sealing a break between the filmmaker and his homeland.

More recently, the world blockbuster Barbie, by Greta Gerwig, was deprived of theaters in Algeria.

Just a year ago, the Society of Film Directors (SRF) denounced the abolition of the public support system for Algerian cinema, replaced by another system. A blow for a cinema “thriving and recognized well beyond the borders of his country”, she estimated.

“I don’t believe that Algerian cinema no longer exists, it’s not dead because there are Algerian directors all over the world who are fighting and trying to make things happen,” he said. he.

Algeria is the only African country to have won a Palme d’Or. It was in 1975 with “Chronicle of the ember years” by Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina.

If the Algerian 7th art wants to have a chance to flourish, it takes “political will”, he says. “You have to do things the old way, choose projects, help them finance them, and freedom”.

Does he still feel like an Algerian director, as he defined himself a few years ago? “Yes, I’m an Algerian director but I’m also a French director. It’s complicated and at the same time it’s not because it’s the result of our common history,” he said.

“No offense to some, anyone who wants to be an Algerian director has the right to be an Algerian director, even if you have to go get money elsewhere and you can’t shoot on the spot” .

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