Visions du Réel 2020 - Their Algeria
Visions du RéelLina Soualem’s documentary Their Algeria opens with a piece of home video footage, recorded by her father. Among other things, his camera captures a little moment when Lina, a two-years-old at the time, sat in her grandmother’s lap. This moment of familial serenity is followed by a scene (still within the same body of home video) where, from behind the camera, Lina’s father asks the grandparents to say something in Arabic. They act surprised and say that Lina wouldn’t understand, so they decide against it.
What follows this short introductory section is a film where Lina Soualem, now an adult woman who clearly inherited her father’s passion for filmmaking, explores the meaning of these scenes. Puzzled by her grandparents’ sudden separation after over six decades together, the filmmaker realizes she barely knows them. After all, in the lives of many people grandparents are more akin to archetypes, associated with very specific traits and encountered during family functions, rather than people with enormous life experience, aspirations, regrets and stories they would like to tell if anyone would care to listen.
Therefore, Soualem points her camera at her grandparents hoping she could learn something about their lives and perhaps understand why they decided to part ways, even though they still live very close to one another and see each other daily. Aicha and Mabrouk turn out to be quite challenging interviewees: Mabrouk is almost completely withdrawn, laconic and senile, while Aicha is a tornado of emotions and difficult to guide along a focused conversation. However, as the filmmaker bombards them with questions, they start offering extremely interesting nuggets of information from their past, which ever so slowly – and aided by additional commentary offered by her father Zinedine - build a nuanced commentary on their lives as immigrants in France.
In fact, although the filmmaker’s original mission to explore the seemingly bizarre idea of their grandparents living apart (but not really) would make an admirable goal for a low-key documentary, the real potential of her film resides in getting them to open up about their past; at its core, Their Algeria is a commentary about their immigrant experience. Soualem’s grandparents eventually offer fascinating insights about their arranged marriage, their move to France to work and their eventual entrapment in a foreign country when the Algerian War for Independence broke out. They couldn’t go back to their home country anymore and had to turn France – their temporary accommodation – into a permanent new home.
Their little seemingly throwaway comments and shreds of distant memories add up to a picture known in extreme detail to anyone familiar with the concept of leaving one’s home country behind. It is a paradoxical experience for the ex-patriates in question, as well as their children and grandchildren. It is insanely difficult to capture the tragic essence of this paradox, such as the notion of being trapped between cultures or feeling strong allegiance to a country one has never set foot in. Yet, despite having to tease out these nuances from her interviewees, Soualem did her utmost to assemble a cohesive picture reflecting this complexity.
Though, her success was only partial because she may have felt she owed it to herself (and her subjects) to retain the original character focus. While it isn’t exactly a deal-breaking detractor, it must be acknowledged that what she stumbled upon while interviewing her family members was infinitely more interesting than trying to comprehend her grandparents’ separation. In fact, the film could have thrived solely on its face-to-face interviews, as Lina Soualem proves herself as an inquisitive interlocutor capable of asking interesting questions her subjects to open without forcing them too far outside of their comfort zones.
Therefore, Soualem’s Their Algeria is itself trapped between a rock and a hard place in that it tries to succeed both as a character study about two old people up-ending their lives and an illuminating journey into the tumultuous past of her family. One of these two angles is decidedly stronger than the other. As a result, the infrequent detours to follow Aicha and Mabrouk as they go about their strange new daily routines are merely a distraction from what the film really should be doing: spending more time asking and following up on such fascinating questions as what it’s like to be Algerian without ever having gone there, the ins and outs of how small communities of Algerian expats could transform a town hall in a small French town into a piece of their homeland for an evening, or why her grandparents did not speak Arabic for the camera in 1992.
In consequence, Their Algeria feels as though it is an unfinished feature which could have been an absolutely fantastic companion piece to Lulu Wang’s The Farewell if it leaned a bit heavier into exploring its most potent aspects of interrogating national identity and how perception of cultural belonging changes with generations. Even if it meant adding an hour to the running time, it would have made Soualem’s film a standout success as opposed to a promising-yet-flawed debut that it is in its current state.
