Leptis Magna Rome in Africa

Documentary series in two parts: 1. A people without a voice (80'), 2. A land in mourning (78'). Part 1: A people without a voice: October 88, the Algerian Republic is faltering, the film goes back to the sources of this tragedy and explains how the face to face between the Islamists and those in power began. The interruption of the legislative elections of December 91, followed shortly after the assassination of President Boudiaf in June 92, plunged Algeria into chaos. Part 2: A land in mourning: the cycle of violence that leads to massacres and the economic and geopolitical underside of the war. More than 100,000 deaths, an incredible degree of barbarity, massacres, apparently incomprehensible... Behind the official window of power and its artificial political scene, hides a shadow power.

Following the appeal of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, founding member of the International Parliament of Writers besieged in Ramallah, a delegation of writers went there to demonstrate alongside the Palestinians a "beautiful linguistic collaboration" in these "high places of spirituality” (Ramallah in Arabic) where the Israeli program of humiliation is also a “verbicidal war”. “We want to listen and make other voices heard in the din of war, that of writers, artists, academics, all those who are preparing for the future... Opposing the logic of war, not a force of "interposition but INTERPRETATION FORCES", says the French writer Christian Salmon, member of this international delegation.

This inspired hybrid of documentary and fiction follows Jabir, who runs a mobile cinema from his old truck throughout the West Bank while his wife works to bring emergency medical care to Palestinians. When Jabir is invited by a spirited schoolteacher to make a screening in the old city of Jerusalem, he becomes obsessed with the idea of this pilgrimage and begins to investigate the possibilities.

It is the first time that Leïla Shahid has agreed to a portrait. At a time when news images blind us and fuel debate, this film takes a step back and looks at the history of a land torn apart, through the personal story of a unique ambassador. Hope and peace are still the key words of the woman who has, for over 30 years, pleaded the cause of the Palestinian people in Europe.