STATEMENT

I wanted to film Algiers, to move away from the usual representations. To explore the “underbelly of Algiers,” to borrow the title of one of my father’s books. Just as Ameziane seeks to avoid Orientalism in his literary works, I wanted to distance myself from it in filmmaking. It’s also a film about seeing: we learn to see, especially the jacarandas, these majestic trees present throughout the city and to which we pay little attention.

(…) The soul of a city lies in its inhabitants. This is present in the film, but also in the novel and in Ameziane’s way of life. He could talk to government ministers and local youths on the same day with the same enthusiasm. I was lucky enough to grow up in a neighborhood in Algiers where we lived alongside all walks of life.

(…) When I asked my father what the tree in his book represented, he told me that the jacaranda symbolized the refusal to give up, and the resilience of poetry. He often said to me, “It was women who saved us in the 1990s. They were beautiful, they dressed well, they went out… They carried the torch of beauty.” With the jacaranda, he found the perfect symbol. This majestic, colorful tree that no one sees because no one pays attention to it. In the unstable world we know today, this attention to poetry is, I believe, a true form of resistance.