À Mansourah, tu nous as séparés
Dorothee Myriam Kellou
France, Algeria, Denmark | 2019 | 62 min
World premiere
Languages : French, Arabic, Kabyle
Subtitles : English, French
Originally there was a silence. That of Malek, the filmmaker’s father, who for years said nothing of his childhood in Algeria. And then, the need to break the silence, with a script that he gives to his children, to start telling his story. Several years later, the father and daughter finally make the journey to Mansourah, his native village: seeing his house, meeting other men who experienced the same heartbreak. Little by little, the film reveals what Malek, like many others, has long kept quiet about. During the war, more than two million people were displaced by the French Army and grouped together in camps or villages. An uprooting until now obscured from historical memory, because if the deed is documented it is largely ignored, in France, but also in Algeria. Here it is, first and foremost, a matter of transmission, by collecting words, to start understanding the scale of the upheavals caused by the regroupings in the countryside. Seizing the language of film, that which was transmitted to her by her father, Dorothée-Myriam Kellou thus endeavours to fill in the family silences and the gaps in History.
Céline Guénot
