Angoulême 2024 – day 1: Rabia, Sophie Fillières, The Erasure

Daily report of the 17th edition of the Angoulême French-language film festival.

Movie of the day: Rabia by Mareike Engelhardt

First day of competition. First screening. First shock that immediately sets the bar very high in the race for the Valois d’Or that Kristin Scott-Thomas’ jury will award. This first feature takes us in the footsteps of Jessica, a 19-year-old French woman who leaves with one of her friends for Syria to join Daesh. A story of an hour and a half without any downtime, to the bone, inspired by unfortunately tragically true events, and born from an encounter 8 years ago between the director and a young woman who herself returned from Syria where she had spent several months within the Islamic State, when she spoke no more Arabic than she knew Islam!

And to tell this radicalization that seems so irrational, the filmmaker chose a unique angle. The daily life of a house… of future wives of fighters run with an iron fist by “Madame”, who chooses which girl will be offered to which terrorist. A sort of local Madame Claude who will put Jessica under her thumb. A character inspired by the Belgian-Moroccan Malika El-Aroud, nicknamed the Black Widow of Jihad who had notably been married to one of Commander Massoud’s assassins, who died in 2023 and who is masterfully played by Lubna Azabal. The great and strong idea of Rabia is to make the story a closed room.

To translate into images the prison-like trap that is anything but golden and that closes on these blinded young women, who came to Syria to seek a space of freedom that seemed to be lacking in France. And to make what is happening between Jessica and Madame even more violent, perverse and quickly unbearable. A relentlessly masterful film where Meghan Northam, already excellent a short while ago in Meanwhile on Earth by Jeremy Clapin, delivers the most impressive composition of his young career.

Released November 27th

Actress of the day: Agnès Jaoui for My life, my face

Every year, the Angoulême festival puts a distributor in the spotlight of screenings in a section called Family Jewels. After StudioCanal last year, it is Jour2Fête’s turn to be honored in this way. With the screening of five films from their catalog (The Challat of Tunis, The Bertrand Farm…) and an unreleased film. The final film by the late Sophie Fillières, discovered at the Cannes Filmmakers’ Fortnight and which will be released in September. A gem of melancholy and humor mixed in the form of a self-portrait of a woman who, having reached fifty, after having been a good mother, a colleague prized by others and a great lover, appears at a crossroads, confronted with solitude and a growing fear of death.

“Les gens qui doutent” by Anne Sylvestre could have been the soundtrack, as the lyrics of this song resonate with the journey undertaken by its heroine to find a taste for life and her place in a world she feels increasingly alien to. Few films are capable of talking about depression with such acuity, lightness and depth. We come out of it with a smile on our lips and tears in our eyes, but also the certainty that Agnès Jaoui, sublime in the central role, would make an equally sublime César for best actress next February.

Released September 18th

Director of the day: Karim Moussaoui with The Erasure

We discovered Algerian filmmaker Karim Moussaoui in 2017 with his first feature film, Waiting for the swallowswhich was screened at Un Certain Regard in Cannes, an enlightening x-ray of Algeria today through three intertwined stories. With The Erasurepresented here in competition, Moussaoui continues this work by driving the point home. This adaptation of a novel by his compatriot Samir Toumi (published in 2016) tells the story of a sacrificed generation, that of sons whose fathers were constantly glorified by the Algerian state in the name of national construction while they perverted the hope, meaning and values ​​carried by decolonization in which they nevertheless actively participated.

This is the case of its main character, Reda (Sammy Lechea, remarkable), an employee of the largest hydrocarbon company in the country run by his father, rich, cold and authoritarian. The latter exercises such a hold over him that on the day of his death, Reda, passing in front of a mirror, discovers… that his reflection has completely disappeared! And it is by adorning itself with fantasy that this societal and generational chronicle takes on its full relief, creating on the screen a climate of troubled, intriguing and by ricochet exciting tension. The only possible space in the background, because disconnected from reality, to allow Reda to try to free himself from a weight threatening to stick to his heels for the rest of his life: the inability to be up to it because he was born too late to participate in the war of independence.

Released on April 16, 2025