Black decade
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A fantastic and political parable, Dania Raymond’s clumsy but determined film makes ghosts reappear in an Algeria never named.
In order to return to the source of the trauma, to ward off it by bringing back the dead – stunned but intact zombies – in a torment of yellow clouds, rising winds and downpours, the Storms chooses to start at the end, with saving his life. The film, disjointed and tumultuous, which has the ragged qualities of its faults, of its great inner disorder, opens with a great scene of decompensation: the renunciation of the hero, Nacer, to his revenge, while he has to thank you the murderer of his wife, Fajar, killed by a bullet in the head at a military checkpoint twenty years ago, in the middle of the civil war. A journalist in an unreconciled country, where the wandering shadows of the disappeared soon reappear, Nacer lowers his revolver and returns to town.
The country is not named. Dania Reymond had to film and look elsewhere – move on: shot in Morocco, her first feature film nevertheless targets Algeria, her native country left in 1994 (she was 11 years old), a citadel still bristling with military dictates, from which she chose to shoot a parable film. Between Fog by Carpenter for the saffron cloud that covers the city, Acid by Philippot for the advancing scourge, and the series the Returned for the
