Houria: Algerian Women’s Bodies and Youth Searching for Freedom

Cesar for Best Debut Film and Cesar for Best Newcomer Lina Khoudri can be found at nymphDirector Mounia Meddour continues to listen to Algerian society after the years of civil war. In Algiers today, Houria Lina Khedri is a talented classical dancer who participates nightly in secret bets. One evening when she is winning a meritocracy, a man violently attacks her.

Traumatized, her body bruised, she loses the ability to speak, and rebuilds herself with the disabled women, most of whom are as mute as she is. Through collective female experience, contemporary dance and sign language, Houria recovers. A great metaphor for Algerian youth, including the Hirak revolution ( weekly protests between 2019 and 2021).did not overcome the patriarchal, traditional, closed, violent and corrupt system.

Unable to show her films in Algeria, Mounia Meddour documents Algeria’s drift into the novel and her collusion with Lina Khoudri, with whom she is exposed. papicha, And who has since done an amazing job, this movie shines.

All beauty and bloodshed by Laura Poitras

The American documentary filmmaker has been making an impression for several years with her committed films, such as Citizen Four On Edward Snowden. Here, she touches on another social topic, the opioid crisis in the United States, or how these opioids, usually prescribed drop by drop as painkillers, have become popular, causing hundreds of thousands of addictive and dangerous drug addictions. A health scandal, with the complicity of the US health authorities, granting permits to drug manufacturers, and in particular the famous Sackler family.

Laura Poitras chooses to tell the scandal, after battling photographer Nan Goldin, herself an ex-addict, her punk life, her protest art, and the idea of ​​a bohemian America, on the fringes, would you say too, unconventional, particularly in the height of the AIDS years.

Above all, do not be fooled by preconceived notions one might have about such work, it is neither complex nor intellectual, All beauty and bloodshed is a fascinating, often lurid, sometimes poignant documentary that spotlights an important artist, Nan Goldin, who may still be underrated today, and tells her intimate story, her loved ones who were victims of AIDS falling by the dozens in the 1980s, or the story of her sister. Barbara, who killed herself because she was a lesbian, in a society that had not yet accepted her.