Educational Media Reviews Online

Nadia Zouaoui’s journey back to the Kabylia region in Algeria she left eighteen years earlier is hardly a joyous one. She had left as a teenager to become the reluctant wife of a much older man in Montreal whom she had never met, and has now come back a divorced woman with an even stronger opposition to the cultural practices that shape the female condition in Algeria. She turns her camera on women of different generations – her mother and her friends, other older women, school friends, and younger cousins – with a view to comparing the status of women, both past and current.

What she finds in what she calls “the kingdom of men” is not very encouraging. The lives of the younger women are as restricted as the older women’s had been. While they do not use the terms often repeated by the latter (“harsh” and “severe”) to describe their men folk, the younger women still feel the oppressiveness of a culture that confines them to the home and prevents them from keeping their children after a divorce.

Under the Algerian legal code, Zouaoui reveals, women are viewed as minors. In the part of the country she presents in the documentary, the men do even the grocery shopping. The relatively ‘progressive’ ones who may prefer their wives to be partners in the marriage, like the husband of Nadia’s school friend, dare not change things because they fear being branded as weak by society. The refrain heard many times in the film from young and old, male and female alike is: “it isn’t done.” Even Zouaoui feels bound by this old belief because she does not disclose to the older women in the village that she divorced her abusive husband.

There are, however, glimpses of changing attitudes. This is best epitomized by Linda, the liberated veterinary doctor whom the farmers have come to accept, if only because of her importance to the health of their livestock. In other examples, Nadia’s younger relatives say that they were involved in choosing their husbands, and her college-age cousins talk openly about change.

By the end of the film, one is not sure real change will come soon for the women in Tazmalt village. Linda the vet is not having much success finding an open-minded man to marry. Even as the men admit that the women are pushing for change, they find it hard to conceive of any change that would not clash with their Islamic and cultural traditions. Perhaps the woman who Zouaoui interviews, whose face remains hidden behind the weaving loom, best represents the women’s future, as the film seems to suggest. The poetry of protest she composes will continue to be recited by women in the village but the men will not act upon the words.

Awards

• Prix Gémeaux, Montreal, Caméra au poing Award 2007
• Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal 2006