Djamila Sahraoui

Djamila Sahraoui

Biography

Djamila Sahraoui was born in 1950 in the Algerian village of Tazmalt. She studied literature in Algiers and film direction at the IDHEC film school (Institute des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques) in Paris, where she still lives today. In 1980 she made the fiction short film "Houria". Afterwards she worked for a long time exclusively as a documentary-maker and was recognised for her work in 1997 when she received the esteemed Villa Medici "Hors les Murs" prize. Her early documentary films include "Avoir 2000 ans dans les Aures" (1990) about the Roman, Arab, Turkish and French history of Algeria, and "Prenom Marianne" (1992), a piece for the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. Her documentary "La moitie du ciel d’Allah" (1995) depicts the Algerian women’s involvement in their country‘s fight for independence and their struggle for equality ever since – the first part of a cinematic chronicle of Algerian society.

It was followed by "Algerie, la vie quand meme" (1999), a film about the issues and hopes of young people in her birth town of Tazmalt, and "Algerie, la vie toujours" (2002) about a town that is isolated from God and the world (the government), where the younger generation take up the initiative to improve their meagre living conditions. "Et les arbres poussent en Kabylie" (2003) documents the everyday life in a village inhabited by Berbers in the Algerian region of Kabylie, where many people dream of being able to start a new life somewhere else due to their lack of employment and prospects. "Barakat!" was Djamila Sahraoui’s first full-length feature film in 2006 and it deals with the journey and relationship of two women from different generations in the civil war-torn Algeria of the 1990s. As she had for her documentary films, Djamila Sahraoui received further awards for this feature film at a host of international festivals, including those in Ouagadougou, Cairo and Milan.

As early as the 1990s Djamila Sahraoui said the following about her motivation for making films about the situation faced by women in Algeria: "Being a woman in Algeria has always meant living in flux between pain and hope, between inside and outside. They are inwardly imprisoned by walls, veils, subjugation and death, yet outwardly there is hope in the form of revolts, fights for freedom, at work... and maybe even in exile."

Filmography

Yema (2012): Actor, Direction

Barakat ! (2006): Screenplay, Direction