Your previous films revolve around a place, with one or two characters who are connected to it. Alea Jacarandas is built around the figure of your father, whom we discover as a novelist and a journalist. Why did you decide to make him the starting point of the film?
It was a happy accident because, initially, I wanted to make a documentary featuring a private detective in Algiers. The project was already quite far along, but it ultimately fell through. Then I realised there was actually another detective right beside me who happened to be writing a novel called The Jacaranda Inspector. That was the title of the book he was working on at the time. So I thought to myself, well, there it is. It also answered a much older desire of mine to make an unconventional portrait of Algiers, of my city, of the city where I grew up. I had finally found the right pretext and the right protagonist through whom to tell the story of the city I grew up in. In addition, my father was someone who was deeply in love with his city, someone inhabited by his city. That’s how the idea for Alea Jacarandas was born.
There was also the jacaranda tree itself, which provided a way of speaking about Algiers through something that came from elsewhere, from Latin America. I found it a beautiful allegory to talk about a city using an external referent. A tree that is not endemic, that is not from there and that will reveal the city from a different perspective.
Speaking of the jacaranda: it gives its title both to your film and to the novel your father was writing. Why did you choose it as the film’s starting point?
For me, making a portrait meant visiting different places in Algiers, wandering through the city by following the jacaranda trees, each tree would lead us somewhere else, almost like a snowball gathering momentum, allowing us to see Algiers differently. There was the idea of little breadcrumbs scattered across the city, guiding our journey through it. So the trees were leading us through Algiers.
Then there’s the allegory that appears in my father’s novel, which I also tried to convey in the film. This tree invites us to look at things differently, to look up in order to notice the beauty, the poetry ; but, in the novel, it is also used to note that during the 1990s, during the years of terrorism in Algeria, we were struck by a kind of blindness and that we couldn’t see them, we couldn’t see these trees. It was as though they had suddenly appeared overnight. There is also something like a sudden appearance of these trees. So the tree also became a way of thinking about how we look at things, the way we see things, how we pay attention to the world. As a filmmaker, that’s something that deeply interests me, where we position ourselves, how we look at things. The jacaranda embodied that idea. And although Algiers is known as the White City, I liked the idea of introducing a touch of purple into it. We tried to create a subtle nuance, a slight contrast. The purple, of the jacaranda, brought exactly that.
Your film is deeply inhabited by Algiers, its history, what it means to live there, and the question of whether one should leave it…What kind of relationship with the city did you want the audience to experience?
It’s one of the film’s three pillars : the portrait of Algiers. Afterwards, other dimensions gradually emerged, because I saw what had happened, it is also the connection to my relationship with my father…
But it isn’t meant to be a portrait. It’s much more a love portrait of Algiers than an exhaustive portrait : of impressions and of what remains unseen. I eventually realised that it’s possible to portray a city without constantly showing it. Indeed, in the film, we can see Algiers, we start with it, we finish with it, it is always there and yet we don’t actually see that much of it.
It’s also an interior film, it’s also an intimate film, it’s also about how to speak about a city without always looking directly at it. Above all, I want to share my love and especially my father’s love for Algiers, with the audience. There you have it, that was really the original idea, it’s an unconventional portrait, an affectionate portrait. Perhaps it resides precisely in what remains off-screen, in everything the film chooses not to show, perhaps. In the end, the film answers our question: whether I intended it or not at the start, it also becomes a film about transmission.
We see your father at work on his novel, as an artist-writer, and we see you working on your film, as an artist-filmmaker. Could you elaborate on this idea of transmission?
Yes indeed, in one of the scenes, he asks me the question directly by asking : “What did all this do to you? Is this what led you to pick up a camera?” He asks me very plainly and I end up not being able to answer, I struggle to answer his question, I remain silent. Only afterward did I realise that the entire film was trying to answer that question. What exactly had been passed on to me in this regard, in his gaze, in seeing him stop to contemplate a tree, or standing beneath a balcony, observing the layers of history embedded in the city?
In a sense, the film answers this question, these two artistic practices. It is that of a writer and that of a filmmaker, both at work, but also marked by the experience of grief. Once he is gone, I inherit his quest, which is to say the jacarandas, that I abandon because it is not truly my quest, it is another quest, it is a quest that belongs to the realm of images, that is connected to something different that I will find once again.
Unlike your previous films, this film is much more autobiographical, in which you show yourself at work, you shoot footage, with a MiniDV camera, that somehow documents your early steps as a filmmaker…why did you make that choice?
It wasn’t planned at all at the beginning, even my mother wasn’t supposed to be in the film! But she said to me “you have lost your main actor, so I’ll let you film me” We are in reality, because I didn’t have many hours of footage with him: we had filmed together for only seven days, and that material alone wasn’t enough to sustain a film, so I had to find ways of filling in the gaps, so that what I had filmed could resonate and take on another dimension.
That’s why I eventually placed myself in front of the camera, but it’s also why I brought back Samir, the actor, why I invited my mother, why I asked people I encountered in the street…The film acquired an additional dimension that I had never anticipated, one that was far more intimate. Indeed, usually, this isn’t the kind of territory I explore but I felt compelled to dig deeper… or rather, I realised that this new direction could coexist perfectly well with the original intention, that of making a portrait of Algiers and a portrait of my father. It therefore became another layer laid over those that had been there from the beginning. And, in the end they all coexist, all of these layers manage to exist within the same film, all of these dimensions.
Interviewed by Nathan Letoré
