EShe plays Fatima in the film “Les évadés de Tindouf”, produced by Orion Productions. Her character is that of a young senior woman in the Moroccan army who was kidnapped and held prisoner in the Tindouf camps for 25 years. When she was casting for this role, Alia Bencheikh had amateur acting training and acting workshops behind her, and nothing more. But she has always loved theater, she did a lot of it as a young student and she loves cinema with a passion. But from there to play in a film, to embody such a heavy and complex character, you need courage, power, a lot of intuition, emotional intelligence and a large dose of work and application.
“I didn’t think I would go this far in this role. Certainly, the character of Fatima is complex, human, with an enormous load of pain and resilience, but being as close as possible to the feelings and emotions that this implies and living this role for days like second nature is there all the beauty and grace of cinema and creativity. I read the script, I assimilated the character, I understood what the director wants to see on screen, I internalized all these elements and I lived with my character. To a large extent, I became Fatima, with her past, with her previous life, her long years in prison, her strength, her resistance and her hopes. It must also be said that with the director of the film, we all had total freedom to embody our characters and give them the words that went with them, in a natural way. It was not a question of reproducing what was written on the service sheet, but of saying things as felt from the inside, with our own words, our own reflexes in the face of all the situations that we had to play out. specifies Alia Bencheikh.
And it is this faculty of adaptation in Alia Bencheikh, certainly with her learning and her experience as a doctor, who knows what discipline is, who knows what involvement and rigor are, which has made that this role of Fatima was one of the most well-crafted in this film. Alia Bencheikh, who also sings very well, even went so far as to improvise a song during one of the most moving scenes in this film, the moment where one of the detainees dies in the desert, on the sand and his companions of escape will bury him with dignity and pay tribute to him for all his bravery and self-sacrifice. Fatima, alias Alia Bencheikh, covers the body of her friend with sand and launches in a painful voice, like a funeral march, sonnets taken from a beautiful Moroccan song, entitled: “Rahila”, immortalized by Mohamed El Hayani, but before this by the late Abdessalam Amer.
We were all taken by this improvisation and the cinematographer, Abderrahmane Alami, continued to film, as if we had rehearsed this scene before putting it in the box, until the end, offering us one of the most memorable moments. most magical of this shoot and this film.
“It came like that, I didn’t even know the words. I took out my phone just before shooting the scenes and read a little. Then, once there, the melodies came back and invaded me, and I sang, like a litany, like a hymn, like a funeral oration to accompany a brother in arms to his last resting place, in the sand , at night, alone, lost in the immensity of a hostile desert, without any other form of hope than our determination to complete our journey back to our home, to our land, our country, after 25 years of barbaric detention”, concludes Alia Bencheikh, who is already part of the next casting of the film “Cannabis”, still produced by Orion Productions.
