DANS MA TÊTE UN ROND-POINT

Despite the title, the decor does not contain any road elements and we find ourselves in a slaughterhouse in Algiers. Retained within such a framework so frequently described by the cinema, one might expect a show of cruelty (a word which literally means flowing blood). It is not. The slaughterhouse here is primarily a huis-clos, meaning a theatre stage on which some characters, who have taken up residence, develop. These men are the heroes (because this universe is exclusively male), young and old, and no steer, dead or alive, will steal the show from them. We remember Tarzan, Don Quixote and Us (FID 2014), where the young Hassen Ferhani already handled with virtuosity, humour and precision, an eager-to-describe camera, rather than the broader context of singular figures. Even more so here, if something of a group portrait is targeted, after having given space to each character to exist in its complexity, in its fragility, in its innocence as in the science that is its own, like the worker-storyteller who seriously discusses the choice of the title of the film being made. (JPR) Hassen Ferhani