Issaad Salah

During the siege of their city, a group of ordinary people struggle to survive amid hunger, snipers, and bombardments, while clinging to human connection, love, and small daily pleasures. Faced with impossible moral choices and deep psychological strain, their lives become inseparable from the siege itself.

Soula Bahri plays herself in Salah Issaad’s debut feature, a road movie about a young single mother rejected by her family for dishonouring them and by a society that does not care about people like her. Trying to make it through the night with her baby, she sets out along the roads of Algeria only to find herself caught up, through a series of unfortunate encounters, in a spiral of violence. Soula is an extraordinary portrait of a woman under pressure, both from those closest to her and a society riddled with contradictions.