Daughter of Keltoum

Posted to www.marxmail.org on June 10, 2006

As part of First Run Features Global Film Initiative, "Daughter of Keltoum" is a worthy if far from perfect entry by Algerian film-maker Mehdi Charef, who has lived in France since the age of 10. It is an exploration of the class and gender oppression facing the Kabyle peoples, the Algerian branch of the Berber nationality that lives primarily in the mountainous region of the north.

It is focused on the relationship between Rallia (Cylia Malki), a 19 year old Kabyle who was adopted by Swiss parents as an infant, and her aunt Nedjma (Baya Belal). Rallia has returned to the village where she was born in search of her mother, who is now working as a hotel maid in a distant city. She is also in search of answers to the question of why her mother gave her up.

If Rallia does not understand why, the viewer certainly will. This is a land of grinding poverty, where women are treated as beast of burden. Nejma is in awe of Switzerland where water is readily available from a tap. In her village, she fills up plastic tanks from a remote well and trudges back several times a day. Nejma, who appears to have been driven half-mad by poverty, has very few pleasures in life other than a occasional visit from Rallia's mother, who brings candy and trinkets for the family. In a nearby abandoned religious shrine, Nejma has constructed her own altar out of empty cigarette packs and other colorful but worthless items found on the road beneath the village.

After spending a week or so with Nejma and her grandfather in the desolate but beautiful mountains that her aunt describes as a "hellhole," Rallia decides to go to the city in search of her mother, with the hapless Nejma in tow. "Daughter of Keltoum" at this point turns into a road movie approximating "Thelma and Louise." As the two women hitch their way toward the city, they run into a number of villainous male characters who whatever their differences all seem to share a deep-rooted misogyny.

Also, unlike "Thelma and Louise," the two women never really form an emotional bond since it is obvious that director Charef, working from his own screenplay, has utterly lost belief that any good can come out of modern-day Algeria. This very bleak scenario robs the film of any potential satisfying resolution since the characters have no insight into their misery.

Mehdi Charef's father left for France to work in road construction and his children grew up in the slums surrounding Paris that exploded recently. He trained as a mechanic, and worked in a factory until his first novel "Tea in the Harem" was published in 1983. He later adapted his novel into a feature film with the collaboration of Costa-Gavras.

Although "Daughter of Keltoum" makes no effort to explain the roots of Kabyle oppression, it at least has the merit of presenting the stark truth about how they live. Filmed in Tunisia, presumably dictated by Algerian refusal to allow such a film to be made, "Daughter of Keltoum" is a visually stunning work that has nuggets of intense drama, especially between the two main characters. Perhaps, it was inevitable that the film avoided any sort of conventional happy end because that would not be true to Charef's pessimistic vision.

Algeria has come a long way from the hopeful note that "Battle of Algiers" concludes with. This is a society torn apart by civil war and economic misery. The Kabyles were among the most self-sacrificing fighters in the war for independence but are now the most alienated from the government. A new civil war has pitted this non-Arab people against the central authority and a permanent peace remains doubtful.

In a Boston Globe article from June 8, 2003, Adam Shatz, the book review editor of the Nation Magazine who has written frequently about Algeria, had the following to say:

For several decades, the Algerian government has dealt with the Berbers, the descendants of Algeria's original inhabitants, the way most postcolonial governments in the Middle East and North Africa have dealt with ethnic and religious minorities-by attempting to buy them off, and when that has failed, by the blunt force of repression, in the hope that over time they would assimilate into the majority.

To be fair, the Algerians in power have never been as brutal toward the Berbers as the Iraqis and the Turks have been toward the Kurds, perhaps because many of Algeria's politicians are themselves assimilated Berbers. But today, it's clear that those politicians have been just as successful in encouraging the very resistance they hoped to calm. In the mountainous region of Greater Kabylia, the cradle of Berber Algeria, a full-scale revolt against the Algerian regime and its Arab nationalist ideology has been underway for the past two years: The repressed has returned, with a vengeance.

Ever since the late 19th century, Kabyles have been renowned for their military valor. But despite Berber fighters' disproportionate sacrifices in the revolution against French rule, the National Liberation Front (FLN)-the leading party in the national struggle against French authority-defined Algeria as a homogenous, Arab-Muslim state upon winning independence in 1962. It made standard Arabic mandatory in education, even though the language is spoken by few Algerians, most of whom use a North African dialect. The FLN also broke up Berber cultural meetings and frowned upon the use of the Berber tongue Tamazight as a threat to national unity.

Early last December, I traveled east from Algiers to Tizi Ouzou, Kabylia's largest city and the center of Berber unrest. A two-hour drive and a world away from the capital, Tizi Ouzou is a filthy, sullen town. The roads are barely paved, weeds shoot out of empty lots, and the state appears to be on holiday. All the signs are in French and Tamazight; whatever Arabic there was has been effaced by protestors. Grim, Soviet-style high-rises are scrawled with graffiti hailing the "aarsh" (literally, "tribes" in Tamazight), village committees that have undergone a revival in the last few years. (Belad Abrika, the committee movement's charismatic leader, is a hirsute young man who would not look out of place at a Phish concert. Two years ago this spring, Tizi Ouzou erupted after an 18-year-old man named Massinissa Guermah died in the custody of the gendarmes. Within days, Guermah's death had touched off protests throughout Kabylia. Enraged youths took to the streets to denounce "hogra"-Algerian argot for humiliation by the state-and called for the removal of the gendarmes, whose presence here is deeply resented, all the more so because few of them are native to the area. But the chants soon came to embrace a wide, albeit confused set of demands that ranged from democracy (a yearning expressed by many Algerians) to regional autonomy for Kabylia, a distinctly more controversial proposition. Although it began peacefully enough, the "Kabyle Spring" degenerated into rioting and looting. The gendarmes fought back with live ammunition, killing nearly 100 unarmed Kabyles in a period of 60 days.

For an artist's version of this reality, I recommend "Daughter of Keltoum".