Hassen Ferhani

1956. Algeria is a French colony. Fernand and Helene are madly in love. Fernand is an activist, fighting for independence alongside the Algerians. Helene is fighting for Fernand’s life. History will irrevocably change the course of their destiny.

In the streets of Algiers, jacaranda trees bloom like shards of memory. Following in the footsteps of his father, Ameziane, a writer haunted by these purple trees, Hassen Ferhani explores the city, legacy and love. A rich and intimate quest in which writing, filming or choosing beauty become acts of resistance.

Originally there was a silence. That of Malek, the filmmaker’s father, who for years said nothing of his childhood in Algeria. And then, the need to break the silence, with a script that he gives to his children, to start telling his story. Several years later, the father and daughter finally make the journey to Mansourah, his native village: seeing his house, meeting other men who experienced the same heartbreak. Little by little, the film reveals what Malek, like many others, has long kept quiet about.

Adrianna, a young DJ artist and activist in the queer community, has learned to evolve in a world that is sometimes too stifling for her. By creating her own family and learning trades in which she can use all her creativity, Adrianna is spreading her wings.

Based on a simple idea: transforming the enclosed space of the Image and Movement Studio at the Baumettes prison into a photo studio, the director and a group of seven male inmates experience the power of images and encounters when they summon up the past, intimate and shared histories...

Alone in a small white house on the edge of national road 1, the Trans-Saharan road, which connects Algiers to Tamanrasset crossing the immensity of the desert, Malika, 74, one day opened her door to the director Hassen Ferhani, who came there to scout with his friend Chawki Amari, journalist at El Watan and author of the story Nationale 1 which relates his journey on this north-south axis of more than 2000 km. The Malika of Amari's novel, which Ferhani admits to having first perceived as a "literary fantasy", suddenly takes on an unsuspected human depth in this environment naturally hostile to man. She lends herself to the film project as she welcomes her clients, with an economy of gestures and words, an impression reinforced by the mystery that surrounds her and the rare elements of her biography which suggest that she is not from the region, that she left the fertile north of Algeria to settle in the desert where she lives with a dog and a cat.

In the furnace of Algiers, the camera follows and accompanies Ibrahim, Adam, and Ismael, originally from sub-Saharan Africa, in an irregular situation who live in this hotel with the predestined name. They live from odd jobs. One is an elevator operator in a building, the second is a shoemaker and the third works in the construction sector. The other side of immigration from sub-Saharan Africa. Behind the statistics hide people, bodies waiting to be able to start another life elsewhere. A hotel thus becomes a transit point in which stories and hopes mingle, a place which seems suspended in time and space. A static journey waiting for another to begin.

In the largest slaughterhouse in Algiers, men live and work in closed to the throbbing rhythms of their tasks and their dreams. Hope, bitterness, love, paradise and hell, the football stories as of the Chaabi and Rai melodies that set their lives and their world.