The Hidden Woman

A documentary portrait of aspiring actors from the Conservatoire d’art dramatique de Montréal. Over an extended period, Bachir Bensaddek followed ten students subjected to a rigorous workload and drawn into the endless cycle of auditions. We watch them live their lives as they struggle to carve out a difficult path in a world where solidarity exists alongside competition, and where the playful joy of theatre collides with the urgent need to build a career.

It’s Christmas Eve, but the Algerian taxi driver living in Canada is more caught up in Ramadan. By chance he picks up a compatriot, a former pop star thought dead, and the evening gets more interesting.

David is travelling. He's on a unique trip that doesn't take him from one place to another but from one moment in time to another. Seeking to understand the strange power he has to move around in his own timeline, David will eventually have to confront the disassembled chronology of his own life as well as his repressed past.

Afghanistan, Spring 2002 — Following the fall of the taliban regime, the country faces extreme poverty. To feed his family, a father is forced to sell his 15-year-old daughter to a 65-year-old man. Refusing to accept this fate for her child, the mother, determined to give her a brighter future, arranges a marriage with a man living in Montreal. In return, she makes a solemn promise: the children born of this union will one day marry their cousins remaining in Afghanistan. Montreal, Spring 2020 — The pact resurfaces. Now well integrated into Quebec society, Zarmina refuses to let her 15-year-old daughter marry her cousin in Afghanistan. Her firm opposition triggers a tragic chain of events.