Mohamed Zinet
2021Tahya ya didou!
Mohamed Zinet
Georges Arnaud, Himmoud Brahimi
Originally commissioned by the city of Algiers to promote tourism, Mohamed Zinet’s Tahia ya Didou blends documentary with fiction to create a poetic, acerbic and rapturous portrait of the director’s native city. The camera travels freely, through the port, market, streets and cafés, capturing everyday people, some of whom recur frequently enough to seem like protagonists. The nominal plotline follows a French tourist couple’s leisurely visit to the city, the man having previously served in the army during the Algerian war. As they walk around, his comments betray his mindset’s racist colonial prejudices, while his wife reiterates asinine clichés. Their unhurried wandering is interrupted when he comes across a blind man and realises that he tortured him during his army service. The film is punctuated with punchy sequences that show a poet named Momo delivering verse as an elegy for Algiers.
Viva Didou!
La Vie devant soi
Moshé Mizrahi
Simone Signoret, Michal Bat-Adam
Madame Rosa lives in a sixth-floor walkup in the Pigalle; she's a retired prostitute, Jewish and an Auschwitz survivor, a foster mom to children of other prostitutes. Momo is the oldest and her favorite, an Algerian lad whom she raises as a Muslim. He asks about his parents; she answers evasively. As she ages and takes fewer children, Momo must do more for her; as money is tight, he tries to earn pennies on the street with a puppet. He's a beautiful man-child, and Madame Rosa makes him promise never to sell himself or become a pimp. A film editor, Nadine, befriends him, and his father appears as well. Madame Rosa reaches her last days in fear of hospitals, and Momo must act.
Madame Rosa
Monangambeee
Sarah Maldoror
Mohamed Zinet, Carlos Pestana
“Monangambeee” was a rallying cry used by activists during Angola’s anti-colonial liberation struggle to gather villages together. The film of the same title addresses Portuguese arrogance towards Angolan culture. Sarah Maldoror draws on a novella by José Luandino Vieira, the story of a political prisoner, to make a film about humiliation, solidarity and resistance.
Monangambeee
The Under-Gifted
Claude Zidi
Daniel Auteuil, Michel Galabru
The story centers around a graduating class of "less-gifted" students in a private Versailles high school. Only a miracle has brought the students this far along, and after a practical joke misfires and the whole school is dynamited, the students are in deep trouble. They have to present themselves in court for their punishment and it could not be worse: If they don't pass their high-school graduation exams, they go to prison!
The Under-Gifted
Le bougnol
Daniel Moosmann
Mohamed Zinet, Elisabeth Huppert
A construction worker on a construction site in the Paris suburbs, Mehdi takes the bus to return home after work. Wishing to get off while the vehicle is stationary in a traffic jam, the driver refuses: while restarting, the bus hits the car in front of it. The bus driver attacks Mehdi whom he holds responsible for the incident, claiming that it is forbidden to “talk to the stagehand”. Mehdi is implicated in court and his lawyer tries to draw attention to the living conditions of immigrant workers.
Le Bougnoul
