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Tahia ya Didou

Mohamed Zinet
Algerien 1971
81 min
V'18

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)

Credits
  • Georges Arnaud - Swiss tourist
  • Himmoud Brahimi - Momo, the poet
  • André Moreau - French man
  • Suzie Nacer - French woman
  • Muhammad Zinat - Hassan, the blind man
  • Himoud Brahimi
  • Muhammad Zinat
  • Ali Marok
  • Bruno Muel
  • Pierre Clément
  • Larbi Chenit
  • Noun Serra
  • Monique Cementi
  • Michel Portal
  • M’Hamed el-Anka
Mairie d’Algiers
Cinémathèque algérienne
DCP
col
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