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The release of the film in Algeria was canceled without explanation ... This Wednesday, October 9, he goes out in France. Previously, "Papicha" had received an enthusiastic welcome in Cannes, just when Algerian youth was demonstrating in the streets. This little masterpiece by Mounia Meddour has everything to move the lines, because it shows the path to freedom.
How to fight your way to freedom? In Papicha , her first feature film, the young Algerian director Mounia Meddour shows it in a masterly way. It takes us on a huge film wave in Algeria in the 1990s. Inspired by real events, the film tells the rage of a young girl Algerian face the intimidation of Islamists. With her fabrics and pins, she defends her dream of becoming a fashion designer and therefore of her own world against the sails imposed by terror.
Black and lipstick
Papicha begins in the dark. In the middle of the night, two young students come out the window of their room, then go through a small hole in the fence of their university residence outside where a car awaits them. They have not stolen anything, do not want to commit any crime, they just want to go dancing in a nightclub. By closing the door of the car, they enter a new universe: eyeshadow, lipstick, short dress, bursts of laughter, music at bottom. But, here, a barrage of masked soldiers stops their clandestine taxi ...
We are in Algiers, in 1997, with 40,000 victims, the deadliest year of the black decade. Attacks follow one another at a faster and faster pace. But Nedjma and her friends refuse to stop living. Nedjma's dream is to become a stylist. To keep alive her passion, couture, feminine dresses, daring dresses, she is ready to sell her creations in the toilets of the nightclubs where the pretty girls, the papichas , pull them out. Her dresses allow everyone to show themselves as they are and how they want to be.
Nedjma creates freedom through his fashion
Despite an increasingly explosive political situation, Nedjma stands up, with only her innocent look, her endearing smile, her attractive appearance and her pins. It is the emblem of a free, creative youth, full of projects and hopes. In the beginning, she just arrives with her charm and nonchalance to overcome obstacles and to refuse the diktat of the " hijab for the Muslim".
But very quickly, she realizes how much her thirst for freedom thwarts the Islamist ideas that are imposing themselves with more and more violence in society. Without being able to change the world, Nedjma remains determined to create her own world. After the assassination of her sister photographer, she transforms the haik, this feminine garment in which Linda was shot, into a fabric of freedom. By folding in a new way this double-sided sail of five meters, it is at the same time bend his opponent. Tears and blood, she gave birth to the project of a parade of these dresses of the resistance in his university city.
Papicha , chronicle of a struggle
From the first scenes, sent at a crazy pace, you feel carried away by a wave. With the evidence of her images and the enthusiasm of her story, Mounia Meddour embarks us illico in this university residence in Algiers where all the conflicts and confrontations of the ember years crystallize. Putting a dress and not a hijab becomes an issue of society and even survival. Embodied with incredible energy and conviction by the actresses, the images draw us to the heart of this story. Papicha becomes the chronicle of struggle of these young women determined to defend their spaces of freedom and their rights against Islamists, men and women.
Mounia Meddour, the aesthetics of a resistance
Born in 1978, daughter of Algerian director Azzedine Meddour, Mounia Meddour was 19 years old at the time, like her main character Nedjma, interpreted with great sincerity and the grace of a beauty and an overwhelming youth by Lyna Khoudri. That said, Papicha's real challenge was not to shoot a film about this era, but to pass on to today's generations the raison d'être of a struggle for freedom. And that in a universal way.
After training in journalism and cinema in France and several documentaries like Particules élémentaires (2007) or Algerian cinema, a new breath (2011), Mounia Meddour has visibly found the courage to remember and preserve the spirit, the ethics and the aesthetics of resistance and resilience against the dark forces of fundamentalism. Papicha releases the fury of life, the power of the creation. In other words: when the pins are stronger than the Kalashnikovs.