THE OUTLANDISH
Tahar Kessi
Algeria, France, Qatar | 2024 | 118'
First film, FID 2024

“There’s nowhere left to run: night is falling on every side.” Amsevrid opens with an air of a jazzy, dusky thriller, between the static of a message left like a bottle tossed into the sea and the crackle of a soldering set whose sparks illuminate the men one by one before they return to the anonymity of a small group. Who’s S.K.? Where does this road lead? Who’s this character? Soon, we’re tracking down the disintegrating fiction whilst also tracking down reality as television footage and newspaper headlines follow one after the other, describing revolts, conflagrations, betrayals and repressions. They scan the history of contemporary Algeria from the backdrop of the Black Decade and the terrorist past of the 1990s. Tahar Kessi doesn’t try to explain or embrace a historical truth that would take his side. Free from any chronology we wander, coming across shards of incandescent beauty here and there, shot by shot, accepting our disorientation in the layers of these jittery images. Amsevrid connects spaces, times and people caught up in this hall of mirrors and echoes, shapes and sounds that seem affected by the same traumas. The characters seem to act as if impelled in the paranoid climate distilled by the vestiges of fiction. Amsevrid is just as much a dark, poetic crossing as it is a haunted mental cartography. The territory Tahar Kessi describes is a continuum of corpses retrieved, moments of retreat, songs and marches. On two occasions, women clustered around a loom gather the threads one by one. The threads of the film, perhaps, or maybe of Algeria, which inexorably sees men and women rise up, driven by the idea that revolutions are inspired by the future, not the past.

Claire Lasolle

Date : 22.01.2025 at 8:30 pm
Location : Le Polygone Étoilé, 1 Rue François Massabo, 13002 Marseille
Program