Programme 2

A journey to the Algerian city of V'gayet (Bougie, in French) that was a long time coming finally happens.

In an epistolary tone, Anne-marie addresses someone who is none other than her future self. Literary quotes alternate and combine with the reflections and memories inspired in the filmmaker by this journey; a collage that speaks of the revolution, love, childhood, Algeria, this young city of Béjaïa, language, cinema... in which the original source of a thought matters little because they all flow (together) in a new time and in a new space within the abstract and timeless dimension of film.

Fleeting glimpses of Béjaïa, often through branches or trellises, emerge with urban sounds in the background—a muezzin, a motorcycle, passing voices, swallows, the crashing waves of the omnipresent Mediterranean. The image hides behind shutters and railings while thoughts emerge from between the tree branches. Le bruit du temps, Messaoud is as equally intricate as it is mysterious.

In her latest film, Ostinato al-Ándalus, Anne-marie returns to Algeria to film and think about the Mediterranean as a mirror of who we are and where we come from, as the reflection of a history and a geography. A sea that can be blue or black, and that is not the same in Naples as it is Lebanon.

The vision of this sea repeats in different textures and under different forms, insisting on its condition as a diverse and plural region. Birthplace of civilisations, historic trade route, dramatic cemetery... The Mediterranean is as legendary as it is terrible. Wars and migrations echo in a new score in which the ostinato not only acts as a musical technique but as a way to explore and reaffirm identity.

While a chorus of tongues and accents add detail to some of those chapters, the image is reduced to the essential. The Mediterranean can exist in as little as a blue curtain.