DEMANDE À TON OMBRE

Eight years after leaving native Algeria for France, Lamine Ammar-Khodja
decides to end his exile on January 6, 2011, the day major riots break out in
Algiers. Organised chronologically, the film is a first-person narrative and,
just like Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, to which the director
pays tribute, it deals with the difficulties of getting back home. Because this
journey isn’t only a private matter, but also an opportunity to go back over
Algeria’s recent history, at a time when it could have taken another major
turn. The subject is addressed in the tone of comedy, using humour and
irony, instead of expected despair. Cheerfully mixing styles, playing freely
and gracefully with the cinema medium, and claiming rebellious youth in
the name of all the young outcasts, this first film surely reveals an original
artistic stance and writing: a new director is born. (JPR)