In 2001, the discovery of Wesh Wesh, qu’est-ce qui se passe? landed like a bombshell. Shot on the Bosquets housing estate in Montfermeil, in the “9-3” département where the filmmaker grew up, this first feature blew apart the then-fashionable genre of the banlieue film, along with its stock clichés about the working-class suburbs of Paris. It did so with a blend of anger and tenderness that would become the distinctive tone of all Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s films: anger and revolt against the state of the world and of society; tenderness and fraternity towards, and among, the characters.
Since this initial tour de force, other genres have been invigorated by the assault of the RAZ method: the period adventure film (Les Chants de Mandrin, 2012), the sociological (Dernier maquis, 2008) or evangelical fable (Histoire de Judas, 2015), political dystopia (Terminal Sud, 2019), and film noir (Le Gang des Bois du Temple, 2022). Over the past twenty-five years, nothing has changed: neither injustice, nor anger, nor the libertarian and fraternal impulse of a cinema rooted in the present tense. A cinema of the troupe, the band, the gang. A present of joy and childhood set against the sad passions of domination.
Born in Algeria and raised in France, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche proudly embraces this dual cultural heritage. His cinema has continually travelled back and forth across the Mediterranean: Bled Number One (2005), his second film, offers the Algerian counter-shot to the first. It is in Algeria that he finds the locations and bodies for his Gospel according to Judas. Terminal Sud fuses France and Algeria into a single theatre of civil war. Route Algéricaine (2026) heads south, tracing its path in the sand, in the desert of possibility.
Across eight feature films, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche has built a body of work striking for its consistency and coherence — coherence not only of a vision of the world and of life, but also of a mode of production. His cinema stands as a rare example of economic and aesthetic sovereignty wrested from within the institutional framework of film production. The singular political force of this work lies in this position, maintained from film to film: that of a clandestine workshop, an insubordinate maquis, from which the ideas and forms of revolt and emancipation seek their way towards the widest possible audience.
World premiere of Route Algéricaine at FIDMarseille
A strong wind of freedom blows through RAZ’s films. It will be felt from the opening night of FIDMarseille, with the world premiere of the magnificent new Route Algéricaine. Our heartfelt thanks to Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche and Sarah Sobol for their generosity and trust.
Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche will be in Marseille throughout the week to accompany this complete retrospective, alongside many guests — actors and actresses, long-standing collaborators and accomplices. A collective volume devoted to his cinema will be published in the One, Two, Many series, co-published with Les Éditions de l’Œil. The retrospective will resume in Algiers in September, in partnership with the Institut Français.