Algeria: director Yamina Chouikh is dead

Algerian director Yamina Chouikh, at the Palais des Festivals in Cannes, before the screening of her film "Rachida", during the 55th Cannes Film Festival, May 21, 2002. AFP - ANNE-CHRISTINE POUJOULAT

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Algerian director Yamina Chouikh died on Sunday April 3 in Algiers at the age of 68, following a long illness.

His film

written during the 1990s - the "dark years" of terrorism in Algeria - earned him an international reputation.

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Her friends used to call her “Mina”, to evoke her frankness, her courage, her generosity, her simplicity and her laughter in the face of life's difficulties.

Yamina Chouikh took her first steps in the cinema by integrating, in 1973, the national center of cinema in Algiers.

She is the script for two important films in the history of North African cinema:

 (1976), by Merzak Allouache, and

, by Mohamed Lakhdar Hamina (1982).

She then edited, among other things, the films of the man who would become her husband, Mohamed Chouikh.

Rachida

, his first feature film

It is late in life that Yamina Chouikh becomes a director.

, his first feature film, written in 1996, was not released until 2002, for lack of means.

It deals with the difficult years linked to the rise of terrorism in Algeria through the daily life of a young woman.

It was selected at Cannes before touring the world of festivals.

In 2010, the director, herself a committed and combatant, devoted a documentary film 

to the commitment of women during the Algerian war.

Close to the young filmmakers she always encouraged, she demonstrated alongside them during the Hirak.

Yamina Chouikh was buried in al-Aliya cemetery in Algiers.

She was truly an extraordinary woman, a fighter, committed, strong.

A Mother Courage almost I would say.

Catherine Lecoq looks back on the meeting with Yamina Chouikh

Houda Ibrahim

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