Cinema
Viva Didou!
Tahia ya Didou
Mohamed Zinet · 1971
Synopsis
At random through the streets, the port, the market and the cafés of Algiers, the camera follows inhabitants who return often enough to become characters. A couple of French tourists visit the city; he, who served in the army during the war, betrays his colonial prejudices with every remark, while she repeats clichés. Momo, the poet of the Casbah, declaims his elegy for Algiers. Then, in a bistro, the visitor recognises a blind man, an Algerian he once tortured, and the walk changes in nature.
Context
The municipality of Algiers had commissioned a tourist promotion film; the author, an actor who had never directed anything, shot it between 1969 and early 1971 and delivered something else entirely, mixing documentary and fiction, gag and mourning, when the wounds of the war were still open. He wrote the screenplay with Himoud Brahimi, who plays Momo, and himself plays the blind man; Michel Portal and M'Hamed El Anka compose the music. The commissioners, dissatisfied, shelved the film without a theatrical release. A surviving copy was restored and digitised in 2016.
Who it is for
About an hour and twenty minutes, in Arabic with subtitles, with no continuous story. You should know that the film passes from laughter to pain without warning, and that it is valuable first of all for the city it shows.
Prizes and reception
Its author's only feature film, which has become a cult film of Algerian cinema; restored, it was shown at the Berlinale Forum in 2018 and at MoMA.