Narimane Mari

143 Sahara Street

Alone in a small white house on the edge of national road 1, the Trans-Saharan road, which connects Algiers to Tamanrasset crossing the immensity of the desert, Malika, 74, one day opened her door to the director Hassen Ferhani, who came there to scout with his friend Chawki Amari, journalist at El Watan and author of the story Nationale 1 which relates his journey on this north-south axis of more than 2000 km. The Malika of Amari's novel, which Ferhani admits to having first perceived as a "literary fantasy", suddenly takes on an unsuspected human depth in this environment naturally hostile to man. She lends herself to the film project as she welcomes her clients, with an economy of gestures and words, an impression reinforced by the mystery that surrounds her and the rare elements of her biography which suggest that she is not from the region, that she left the fertile north of Algeria to settle in the desert where she lives with a dog and a cat.

Every Pulse of the Heart Is Work

From a snake charmer to a welder, from a weaver to an obstetrician, the inhabitants of the holy city of Varanasi are striving for survival, and transform and ennoble themselves in the process. A hypnotic study of people at work—a street beggar, a surgeon, a weaver, a priest, a masseur, a tabla drum maker, and a crane operator: people who in their intense concentration and ritualized movements evoke the idea of human labor as an act of spiritual devotion and social interdependence. Filmed largely in India’s ancient holy city of Varanasi

Atlal

Ouled Allal is an area ravaged by war during the nineties in Algeria. A constellation of beings, voices, bodies, and buildings face the test of time and live the scars of a low war without fronts. Among the ruins, memory travels; images and sounds draw a poetic map and a psycho-geographical exploration of the place.

A Roundabout in My Head

In the largest slaughterhouse in Algiers, men live and work in closed to the throbbing rhythms of their tasks and their dreams. Hope, bitterness, love, paradise and hell, the football stories as of the Chaabi and Rai melodies that set their lives and their world.