Bahïa Bencheikh-El-Fegoun

A rich land economically and culturally, Algeria fluctuates today between despair and the hope of a new beginning. Then there is a series of suicides at the heart of society. The coast and the sea. Images flow into and over each other poetically like a Fata Morgana.

Nous, dehors, Bahia Bencheikh-El-Fegoun’s first documentary, exposes women and their bodies in the public space, occupied by men.

When independence is declared in 1962, the minority communities of Jewish and European origin flee Algeria. Four people of Muslim ascendency searching for the truth about their own lives evoke the last decades of French colonization, the years of war, from 1955 to 1962. Hatred and friendship lead us through a hidden memory: their relationships with their Jewish and Christian neighbours. The foundational myths of the new Algeria are revisited, but will they succeed in getting to the bottom of their own legends?