Chawki Amari

Fatima, an Algerian-born woman who now lives in France with her two teenage daughters, with whom she is barely able to communicate.

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.

Reda seemingly has a life of privilege in Algiers, in his late twenties still living at the family home, with a father who has arranged a job and a fiancée. Reda is eager to please, yet the more he tries the more he veers off course.

Algeria today. Past and present collide in the lives of a newly wealthy property developer, a young woman torn between the path of reason and sentiment and an ambitious neurologist impeded by wartime wrongdoings. Three stories that plunge us into the human soul of a contemporary Arab society.

In an estate in the South of Algiers, in the middle of the nineties. Djaber and Yamina are neighbours, but do not know each other. For one as for the other, it is so difficult to meet between girls and boys, that they almost stopped dreaming about it. In a few days nevertheless, what was up to then that deaf and distant violence explodes in front of them, modifying for ever their fates.

On the set of his film, a neurotic filmmaker finds himself paralyzed by the production of his main scene which mimes a murder "streamed" on the networks. While his attempts to obtain a realistic scene fail and under pressure from his producer and her team, a fugitive arrives on his set. It's a miracle for the director who, seduced by the young man, propels him to the leading role in his film, thus shaking up all the established rules. From then on, the border between reality and fiction disintegrates, dragging his team but also the viewer into his psyche.