TENIR LES MURS

Young second generation Algerian migrants in France are suspended, just like their fathers had been, between the desire to return to their homeland and a life below all expectations. They are unemployed, always together, repeating in time words and gestures that always seem the same because devoid of any finality. The decision to go back to Algeria seems to be the only event able to interrupt this mechanism and to give their lives a real direction.

“Paradoxically, it’s in the act of waiting, with our backs to the wall, that the need for a ‘crossing,’ for a ‘return trip’ is the most tangible. Tenir les murs takes shape as a landscape, a territory. Gestures and situations, suspended in an ordinary moment, at the limits of evidence, form the context necessary for a story, for the spooling of time. The deconstruction of time reveals itself to be a flux, setting up the fragility of the true event: the inverted trajectory of exile superimposed on an image of Algiers.”

regia, sceneggiatura, montaggio/director, screenplay, film editing Mehdi Meddaci fotografia/cinematography Raoul Rodriguez
suono/sound Raphaël Hénard
interpreti e personaggi/cast and characters Ouassini Embareck (il figlio/son), Abdelhamid Aktouche (il padre/father), Amadou Ndiaye (Amadou), Younes Taouil (Younes), Reda Kateb (l’uomo col pesce rosso/goldfish man), Nouredine Hamiti (Nourredine), Mustapha Meddaci (l’uomo sulla barca/man on the boat)
produzione, vendita all’estero/production, world sales Les films de la cité coproduzione/coproduction SubLabProd, Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains