News from the cultural sector in the regions and internationally thanks to our correspondents abroad and those who create cultural life where they are.
Every Friday Arnaud Laporte brings news of the artists in residence at Villa Albertine, in the United States.
Bahia Bencheikh El-Fegoun he is a geologist by training and has worked in cinema since 2003, first as an assistant director. He directed his first short film, It is in Constantine, in 2008. Since then he has made two other short films and three documentaries. In his first documentary, Us outhe questioned the place of woman and her body in the public space inhabited by an order of faith, occupied by men, in the country where she lives, Algeria.
Witch, his latest film, currently being finalized, tells “a story of women, a vision and words inhabited by their living emotions” (Bahia Bencheikh El-Fegoun). The film crew is exclusively female, and it is in the context of this work that she is currently finishing her residency at Villa Albertine, New York.
At the microphone of Arnaud Laporte, he returns to the process of creating this hybrid work, “between documentary and phantasmagoria”.
“In 1968, on Halloween day, in New York, the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH) movement arose, whose members marched down Wall Street and danced the saraband, hand in hand, dressed in black cloaks, in front of the Stock Exchange. Eyes closed, heads bowed, the women sang a Berber song (sacred to the eyes of Algerian witches) and proclaimed the imminent collapse of various stocks “.
This passage of the book Witches – The Undefeated Power of Women from Mona Chollet (Editions de La Découverte) is the starting point of Bahia Bencheikh El-Fegoun’s film project. A series of questions flock to her reading, and start the investigation that the filmmaker is carrying out and that will have made her “take the historical paths and listen to the contemporary voices of a political, feminine and feminist movement”, in search of a thought and an imaginary capable of determining the cinematographic form of his project, Witch.
