Stephanie Benamra

Adar, an old actor who loves both theater and cinema. Its character portrays a play about a shoemaker whose dream is to create a political party, the Nail Party, in order to represent the common people in the presidential election in Algeria. It is a story of absence, memories of absence.

Algerian director Hamid Benamra turns his focus to Mustapha Boutadjine, a charming, mercurial collage artist in Paris whose very work methods embody resistance, and celebrate those who work to liberate others. Boutadjine creates his portraits of Third World artists such as Miriam Makeba, and Algerian figures such as Assia Djebar from pieces of paper torn from high end fashion magazines and other, glossy, glitzy publications. Using this material is as much an act of rejecting bourgeois standards, which are often anti-North African in France, as much as elevating these figures and making them the social and visual standard against which we should judge ourselves, not the runway models of Chanel.

A poet chooses to give birth alone at home surrounded by characters pregnant with their dreams. How to let life make its way out of the maternal womb? How to build a family when you had to leave the motherland? How to keep hope alive when even birds are hiding from bombings? Timelife is a lifeline, an umbilical cord linking each of us, no matter the color of the skin, the mother tongue or the land of birth. Timelife «homebirthes» lives, hopes and love. The narrative takes root in each moment of reality. The truth, extracted from context, is fictionalized. A way of staging life.