Erasure: an exciting portrait of Algeria (critic)
The Algerian director of while waiting for the swallows continues to tell his country with a look as relevant as it is singular, tinged with fantastic.
We discovered the Algerian filmmaker Karim Moussaoui in 2017 with his first long, While waiting for the swallowspassed through the a certain look at Cannes, an exciting radiography and all in the finesse of today’s Algeria through three intertwined stories. With Erasure, Presented in competition at the 2024 Angoulême Festival, Moussaoui continues this work by pushing the nail. This adaptation of a novel by his compatriot Samir Toumi (published in 2016) recounts a sacrificed generation, that of the sons whose fathers have never ceased to be glorified by the Algerian state in the name of national construction when they have misguided the hope, meaning and values carried by decolonization.
This is the case of his main character, Reda (Sammy Lechea, remarkable), an employee of the largest hydrocarbon company in the country led by his father, rich, cold and authoritarian. A powerful and crushing man who exerts on him a grip such as the day of his death, Reda, passing in front of a mirror, discovers … that his reflection has completely disappeared. And it is by drawing from fantastic that this societal and generational chronicle takes all its relief, creating on the screen a climate of troubled, intriguing and exciting ricochet. Only possible space, because it is disconnected from reality, to allow Reda to try to free itself from a weight threatening to stick to it at the Basques until the end of its days: the inability to be up to it because it was too late to participate in the war of independence.
By Karim Moussaoui. With Sammy Lechea, Zar Amir Ebrahimi, Hamid Amirouche … Duration 1h33
