SYNOPSIS
The word bled in Bled Number One, the title of Rabah Ameur-Zaimeche’s follow-up to his well-regarded debut Wesh-Wesh (What’s Going On?) in 2001, translates roughly as Hicksville. Which is precisely where Kamel ends up after being deported from France to Algeria, the land of his fathers, after doing time for robbery.

Bled is a finely observed slice of life shot in a low-key semi-documentary style. The latest in a run of French-made movies dealing with Franco-Algerian cross-currents, it speaks volumes about the conditions of life in today’s Algeria and should play well in festivals and in the Arabic-speaking world.

Ameur-Zaimeche, as Kamel, plays the male lead as he did in Wesh whose protagonist also is a young Franco-Algerian recently released from prison. But where the earlier film deals with inner-city issues in France, Bled takes a cold-eyed look at life on the other side of the water.

Ameur-Zaimeche’s direction is unfussy, favoring a quietly reflective mood with slow fades and several long takes of exteriors in dying light. He is never judgmental, but it’s clear where his sympathies lie: In the conflict between tradition and modernity, at least in this corner of the Arab-Islamic world, the latter has a lot of catching up to do. The situation of women who have acquired Western tastes — like a girl who, in the hospital where she has been taken after an abortive suicide attempt, sweetly sings the Billie Holiday classic Don’t Explain — is particularly delicate. (B. Besserglik, Hollywood Reporter)

1.16GB | 1h 37m | 640×352 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/8E16F1093B074D4/Bled_number_one.avi
https://nitro.download/view/E09DF043F259EB4/Bled_number_one.srt

Language:French
Subtitles:English

The post Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche – Bled Number One (2006) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Au fond d’une zone industrielle à l’agonie, Mao, un patron musulman, possède une entreprise de réparation de palettes et un garage de poids-lourds. Il décide d’ouvrir une mosquée et désigne sans aucune concertation l’imam…

Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche has a way of framing shots that can make an industrial landscape look like an art project. The dominant images in Dernier Maquis are of rows of carefully stacked red pallets towering in a truck yard located on the outskirts of Paris, where most of the film takes place. Under the direction of Ameur-Zaïmeche, these unaesthetic objects become fascinating to contemplate. Since his visual approach exhibits so strong a sense of control, it is fitting that he cast himself as the company boss. The yard workers call the boss “Mao,” as his leadership style feigns benevolence to keep them from organizing for better wages.

Like most of the Arab and African workers in the yard, the boss is Muslim. His latest strategy is to convert an empty room into a mosque where the workers can pray. As much as any pious aim, he seems motivated to calm tensions through prayer. The workers appreciate the chance to worship, but they see his mosque-building efforts as an attempt to dodge meeting their other demands. They argue among themselves, tending to divide by ethnicity, over whether the boss has the right to pick their imam and if they should form a union.

The same careful attention that Ameur-Zaïmeche applies to visuals, he also gives to the film’s sound design. He uses mechanical noise the way other directors use music to accentuate mood, from the roar of an airplane flying overhead to the warning beep of a forklift backing up. Against this soulless backdrop, the humanity and individuality of each character gradually emerge. Titi is a somewhat simple-minded Islamic convert deliberating over the need to be circumcised. The lumbering worker named Giant gets spooked over a large rodent. The imam grapples with maintaining loyalty to both the boss and the workers. The mechanics Jamil and Bachir stir the discontent towards a strike.

Ameur-Zaïmeche places these characters in striking tableaux that emphasize how they are affected by their environment. The towers of pallets loom like walls, entrapping everyone in an inevitable struggle for power. (Cameron Bailey)

692MB | 01:29:50 | 656×352 | avi

https://nitroflare.com/view/9125562428DDC85/Dernier_Maquis.avi
https://nitroflare.com/view/002F7D299863A78/Dernier_Maquis.srt

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche – Dernier maquis (2008) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Cannes 2014: Timbuktu review – searing fundamentalist drama
By Peter Bradshaw

Abderrahmane Sissako’s passionate and visually beautiful film Timbuktu is a cry from the heart – with all the more moral authority for being expressed with such grace and such care. It is a portrait of the country of his childhood, the west African state of Mali, and in particular the city of Timbuktu, whose rich and humane traditions are being trampled, as Sissako sees it, by fanatical jihadis, often from outside the country. The story revolves around the death of a cow, affectionately named “GPS” – an appropriate symbol for a country that has lost its way.

These Islamist zealots are banning innocent pleasures such as music and football, and throwing themselves with cold relish into lashings and stonings for adultery. The new puritans appal the local imam, who has long upheld the existing traditions of a benevolent and tolerant Islam; they march into the mosque carrying arms. Besides being addicted to cruelty and bullying, these men are enslaved to their modern devices – mobile phones, cars, video-cameras (for uploading jihadi videos to the internet) and, of course, weapons. Timbuktu is no longer tombouctou la mysterieuse, the magical place of legend, but a harsh, grim, unforgiving place of bigotry and fear.

Sissako creates an interrelated series of characters and tableaux giving us scenes from the life of a traumatised nation, historically torn apart and prone to failures in communication between its three languages: Touareg, Arabic and French. At the centre of this is the tragic story of one family: a herdsman Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed), his wife Satima (Toulou Kiki) and their 12-year-old daughter. Kidane angrily confronts a fisherman who has killed his cow, with tragic results. Mali’s new theocratic state must now rule on something that has nothing to do with infringements of its own proliferating religious laws – and its crass insensitivity and immaturity as a system of government is horribly exposed.

There are some brilliant visual moments: the panoramic vision of the river in which Kidane and the fisherman stagger apart, at different ends of the screen, is superb, composed with a panache that David Lean might have admired. When a jihadi comes close to admitting he is infatuated with Satima, Sissako shows us the undulating dunes with a strategically placed patch of scrub. It is a sudden, Freudian vision of a woman’s naked body, which is then made the subject of a bizarre, misogynist attack.

Elsewhere, young men carry on playing football after football has been banned by miming the game. They rush around the field with an invisible football, earnestly playing a match by imagining where the ball should be. It is a funny, sly, heartbreaking scene, reminiscent of anti-Soviet satire. In another scene, a young man is being coached on how to describe his religious conversion for a video (for an awful moment, it looks as if it might be a suicide-bomber “martyrdom” video). The boy talks about how he used to love rap music, but no longer. Yet in the face of the hectoring and maladroit direction, the boy lowers his head: he finds he cannot mouth these dogmatic platitudes.

In many ways, Sissako’s portrait of Mali is comparable to Ibrahim El-Batout’s portrait of Egypt and the Tahrir Square protests in his film Winter of Discontent. It is built up with enormous emotion, teetering between hope and despair.

https://nitro.download/view/1020E4F7274668B/Timbuktu.2014.FRENCH.720p.BluRay.x264-ULSHD.mkv

English srt:
http://www.opensubtitles.org/en/subtitles/6156970/timbuktu-en
French srt:
http://www.opensubtitles.org/en/subtitles/6112479/timbuktu-fr
Indonesian srt:
http://subscene.com/subtitles/timbuktu/indonesian/1096239
Portuguese-BR srt:
http://www.opensubtitles.org/en/subtitles/6113035/timbuktu-pb

Language(s):French, Arabic, Bambara, English, Songhay
Subtitles:French,English

The post Abderrahmane Sissako – Timbuktu (2014) first appeared on Cinema of the World.