Tahia ya Didou

Die Stadt Algier, die ihn in Auftrag gegeben hatte, wollte TAHIAYA DIDOU am Ende nicht haben. Denn statt eines Films, der den Tourismus ankurbelt, legte Zinet ein auch akustisch experimentierfreudiges Kaleidoskop aus Poesie, Witz und genauer Beobachtung vor; eine Liebeserklärung, in der er zugleich die Wunden des erst acht Jahre zurückliegenden Befreiungskrieges zeigt. Vor allem aber setzt er dem Leben in den engen Gassen der Kasbah ein Denkmal, dem turbulenten Neben- und Durcheinander von fußballverrückten Jungs, von Frauen in Minirock bis vollverschleiert, von Straßenhändlern, Eseln und Touristen. (Barbara Kronsfoth)

Whatever Algiers’ City Hall had in mind when they asked actor Muhammad Zinat to direct a portrait of the city – it certainly wasn’t TAHIYA YA DIDOU; what they’d wanted was an eyes-and-ears pleasing tourism ad to show off the beautiful sites and vistas of DPR Algeria’s capital – what they got was a multi-facetted cum-layered pars pro toto-portray of a contradiction-riddled country that only recently and through great suffering and many sacrifices could (re-) gain its independence.
TAHIYA YA DIDOU is itself a film of several aesthetic minds: Part documentary, part fiction feature, it’s maybe best described as a narrative-keyed essay casually in line with the art of French-born anti-colonialist master René Vautier (with whom Zinat had worked on several shorts), but also influenced by Argentinian auteurs Fernando Solanas’s and Octavio Getino’s then-current Third Cinema ideals. Yet, probably more disturbing for City Hall than the irascible form was the plot concerning a demobbed French soldier who by chance meets one of his torture victims on the street; at a time when in France the ultra-right started to wage war on Algerian immigrants, a story like this was explosive … And thus, TAHIYA YA DIDOU vanished for decades. (Olaf Möller)