La Zerda ou les chants de l'oubli | |
---|---|
الزردة وأغاني النسيان | |
Directed by | Assia Djebar |
Written by | Malek Alloula |
Edited by | Nichole Schlemmer |
Music by | Ahmed Essyad |
Production company | Radiodiffusion Télévision Algérienne (RTA) |
Release date |
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Running time | 59 minutes |
Country | Algeria |
Languages | Arabic, French |
La Zerda ou les chants de l'oubli (English: The Zerda and the Songs of Forgetting) is a 1979 avant-garde experimental documentary film directed by Assia Djebar.
Using archival photographs and film footage shot between 1912 and 1942 in the colonial Maghreb, [1] Djebar composes an experimental film essay in which the soundtrack reveals what the images cannot express alone. [2] [3] [4] The film becomes a historical account that gives life to the forgotten ceremonies (such as the Zerda festival) and repressed lifestyles of indigenous Algerians, while simultaneously questioning the influence of their colonial context on the representations they portray. [5] [6] [7]
The film was directed by Assia Djebar, and experimental in style. [8] [9] [10] [11] The film was one of two documentary films directed by Djebar [12] during her decade-long hiatus from writing, [13] [14] in collaboration with poet Malek Alloula and Moroccan composer Ahmed Essyad. [15] [16]
The film won the prize for Best Historical Film at the 1983 Berlin International Film Festival. [17] [18]
The original reels have disappeared, with the only remaining copy restored and digitised by the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin. [19]
Ousmane Sembène, was a Senegalese film director, producer and writer. The Los Angeles Times considered him one of the greatest authors of Africa and he has often been called the "father of African film".
Fatima-Zohra Imalayen, known by her pen name Assia Djebar, was an Algerian novelist, translator and filmmaker. Most of her works deal with obstacles faced by women, and she is noted for her feminist stance. She is "frequently associated with women's writing movements, her novels are clearly focused on the creation of a genealogy of Algerian women, and her political stance is virulently anti-patriarchal as much as it is anti-colonial." Djebar is considered to be one of North Africa's pre-eminent and most influential writers. She was elected to the Académie française on 16 June 2005, the first writer from the Maghreb to achieve such recognition. For the entire body of her work she was awarded the 1996 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. She was often named as a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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