A harrowing drama of life in wartime, Rachida (2002) was written and directed by Yamina Bachir-Chouikh, the first Algerian woman to write and direct a 35mm feature for theatrical distribution. Told from a feminist point of view, the story particularizes the horror and insecurity of the worst years of Algeria’s Civil War, roughly 1991 through 2002. Schoolteacher Rachida (Ibtissem Djouadi) is shot point-blank when she refuses to help rebel insurgents put a bomb in her school. Doctors save her from bleeding to death and a school administrator helps her relocate with her mother to a small village. But that hamlet is also under threat; the many children living next door have been ‘parked’ there by their militant parents. Another woman accused of informing is raped and her face slashed and is then rejected by her own family. Rachida returns to the city for a checkup and discovers that her name is on a terrorist death list. The final blow comes to the village when rebels attack a wedding, killing many and claiming young women as spoils.
Rachida asks how a decent and peaceful society can devolve into such barbarity — which is of course the intolerable status quo in an increasing number of destabilized nations. Bachir personalizes the unending fear and anxiety through the expressive performance of Ibtissem Djouadi. Many Pan-African films that receive international festival exposure are actually produced from Europe. Rachida was based in Paris but unlike other Algerian woman filmmakers Yamina Benguigui, Djamila Sahraoui and Nadia Cherabi-Labidi, Yamina Bachir was an actual resident of Algiers. Her husband Mohamed Chouikh is an actor and filmmaker, and her daughter Yasmine Chouikh directed her first feature in 2017. Before the 1990s there were almost no female filmmakers in Northwestern Africa, the Maghreb. But in the peaceful 2000s, the number of active woman directors has grown steadily.
by Glenn Erickson
