A large, grey, aggressively snarling rodent is crouching in a corner of the maintenance pit. The car mechanic (Sylvain Roume), who is always the first to arrive at the workshop in the morning and whom everyone calls “le géant” (the giant), is startled. When his workmates arrive, they too are angry and at a loss: how are they supposed to work like this? Why doesn’t Mao, the boss, at least make sure that their workplace is safe? And what kind of animal is this anyway? It’s too big to be a rat, but its tail is not as flat as a beaver’s. When Mao (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche) arrives, things calm down a bit; he explains that the animal is a nutria, an alien species that was introduced from America 100 years ago and that today is found mainly on fur farms. The film doesn’t show how the workers get the animal out of the pit without being harmed by it; instead there is a cut followed by a scene with “le géant” sitting in a small motorboat, the nutria in a mesh cage in front of him, the camera gliding past lush embankments. It’s an idyllic moment, especially considering the restlessness of the previous shots. When “le géant” opens the flap of the cage, the animal hesitates for a moment before noisily jumping to the shore. We don’t see how it lands there; the camera is more interested in a heron emerging from a treetop, presumably startled by the sound. It returns to the boat and to the man, and only then seeks out the rodent in the water.
These scenes are from DERNIER MAQUIS, a film by Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche from 2008, and they contain some of the key elements making up the filmography of the director, writer, producer, and actor. The nutria is far from the only animal to appear in Ameur-Zaïmeche’s films—among others, we encounter a bulldog, an ant, donkeys, many horses, an ox, and a mule. All of these animals have a life of their own, a raison d’être that is not exhausted by their contribution to the progress of the film they are in—particularly to the degree that there is a utopian element in an animal destined for the fur farm finding its way to freedom. And then there is the juxtaposition of two different energies: on the one hand the hectic, aggressive sequence in the workshop, and on the other the tranquil, gentle images shot on the river. The way in which the editing skips over some of the events—in this case, the nutria’s capture—is also characteristic; Ameur-Zaïmeche’s work frequently contains ellipses. In his most recent film, HISTOIRE DE JUDAS (2015), a radical reinterpretation of the relationship between Judas and Jesus, the crucifixion is banished off screen. When the camera is directed at Calvary towards the end of the film, the crosses are already empty again.
Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, who was born in Algeria in 1966, moved to France with his parents at the age of two and grew up in a housing estate near Paris, has made five films so far. They are very different in terms of material and plot; only the first two, WESH WESH, QU’EST-CE QUI SE PASSE? (2001) and BLED NUMBER ONE (2006), are connected by both having a protagonist named Kamel, who may be one and the same person. In the first film, Kamel tries to gain his footing in a housing estate after having entered France from Algeria without papers; he had been deported there after serving a prison sentence. This story, the back story, is told in the second film, although the way Ameur-Zaïmeche tells a story does not generate a stringent, neatly timed narrative; he rather meanders and digresses, foregrounding the peripheral and allowing key plot points to remain vague. It is thus a little too simplistic to say that Kamel arrives in an Algerian village called the bled, wants to stay, but, because he doesn’t feel at home, eventually makes the journey back to France, where he will be a sans-papiers. That is only half the truth about BLED NUMBER ONE. At least this much is certain: at the end of WESH WESH, QU’EST-CE QUI SE PASSE? we hear the same song, Tactikollectif’s “Nekwni S Warrach N Lezzayer,” as at the beginning of BLED NUMBER ONE.
Ameur-Zaïmeche’s most recent three films drift in yet other directions. DERNIER MAQUIS explores the company run by Mao, half lorry workshop, half pallet manufacturing and distribution facility, with unskilled workers from sub-Saharan Africa and mechanics from North Africa. A mosque built on the company premises is meant to cast Mao in the light of a benefactor and ensure peace among the employees. The period piece LES CHANTS DE MANDRIN (2011) ventures into historical territory, sticking to the heels of a gang of smugglers in the south of France several decades before the Revolution. Finally, HISTOIRE DE JUDAS goes even further back in time, rehabilitating a figure who came to be seen as the epitome of a traitor. In the apocryphal Gospel adapted in this film, Judas bears no guilt for Jesus’ arrest; on the contrary, the relationship between the two of them is one of great respect, admiration, and friendship.
This filmography is held together on the one hand by the fact that Ameur-Zaïmeche repeatedly works with the same actors and technicians. Irina Lubtchansky, for instance, is behind the camera in the last three films; Christian Milia-Darmezin plays a drug addict and police informant in WESH WESH, QU’EST-CE QUI SE PASSE?, a man who converts to Islam in DERNIER MAQUIS, and a trader who joins the smugglers in LES CHANTS DE MANDRIN, but he is by no means the only actor to have multiple roles in various Ameur-Zaïmeche films. The director has cast himself in the main role in all five films and hired numerous family members for the first two. Continuity is also created by what the French film critic Jean-Michel Frodon described as “une manière inédite de mettre en scène”—Ameur-Zaïmeche has developed an entirely new and unique way of directing films. He doesn’t retreat into the calm stasis that is characteristic of many films attributed to world cinema. On the contrary, there’s always a lot going on, with many references to current political issues or historical upheavals. In BLED NUMBER ONE, for example, Islamists try to violently enforce their moral code by attacking a man who likes to drink beer and others who like to play dominoes; in DERNIER MAQUIS, pallets play a major role—indispensable for the worldwide transport of goods, they are one of the foundations upon which the logistics of globalisation rests. With their bright red colour and the way they are stacked on top of each other, they also make up an essential structural element of space in the film—the sociopolitical question of the pallets’ function thus intervenes into the design of the film. Furthermore, DERNIER MAQUIS explores the extent to which religion can restrain social tensions and labour conflicts. When it dawns on some of the workers that a mosque is no substitute for fair working conditions, a wildcat strike breaks out. Similar things can be said about each of the other films. But in every case, something ensures that the combination of events, characters and themes are not fully decipherable; none of Ameur-Zaïmeche’s films claims to portray an imbalance among different groups or to represent social problems. Familiar motifs from social dramas and issue films may occur, but they are never given too much attention. Instead they are eroded by ellipses and float alongside other elements of at least equal importance—such as the texture and colour of coarse linen, or the interest paid to the thick hair in the ears of a donkey foal, or galloping riders, shot against the light so that they look like a shadow play, or tracking shots through the housing estate at night to the accompaniment of Curtis Mayfield’s “Ghetto Child”, or the waves of the Mediterranean lapping around three fully clothed bathers, the fabric of their clothes, which normally drapes them like a tent, wet and dark and sticking to their bodies. Again and again there are tongue-in-cheek moments—literally, when actor Ameur-Zaïmeche brings his repertoire of facial expressions to bear, and figuratively, such as when the Romans in HISTOIRE DE JUDAS appear in settings that show their prodigious age. Instead of reconstructing temples and dwellings as they might have looked 2,000 years ago, the director films his characters in present-day archaeological sites, amidst toppled columns and crumbling masonry, happily accepting the anachronism.
Although there are harsh confrontations and conflicts in all of Ameur-Zaïmeche’s films, the basic mood is one of gentleness and friendliness. Sometimes these opposing energies collide, as in the sequence from DERNIER MAQUIS described above, or when the director makes room for a fishing trip in WESH WESH, QU’EST-CE QUI SE PASSE?. Everyday life on the outskirts, dominated by aggressive policemen and rival gangs, lightens up for one scene. A grove, a lake, and lush greenery constitute a space that protrudes into the banlieue as a locus amoenus. Ameur-Zaïmeche embraces gentleness and peacefulness without being naïve and blind. He has a precise idea of conflict, of imbalance, of distortion, but does not let it overwhelm him. Least of all in HISTOIRE DE JUDAS, a film that blithely leaves behind the fundamentalisms and refundamentalisations of the present. Anyone who makes a Bible film with amateur actors in the Algerian hinterland today, taking up a key passage of the Christian tradition and reading it against the grain, knows a thing or two about gentle subversion.
“Pour la joie, pour la beauté de nos rêves!” shouts the leader of the smugglers in LES CHANTS DE MANDRIN before he goes into battle against the soldiers. “For joy, for the beauty of our dreams!” Watching Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche’s films, it seems possible that beauty harbours the promise of emancipation and thus a piece of utopia.
Cristina Nord is the head of the Berlinale Forum.
Translation: Millay Hyatt
Originally published in “kolik film”, April 2015.
