Horror of teachers forced to blow up schools
by Marie-Therese Delboulbes
PARIS (AFP) - Since its fundamentalist Islamic uprising in 1992, more than 100,000 people have been killed in Algeria and everyone in the country has suffered under the near-daily litany of violence.
The constant bloodshed and seemingly intractable cycle have, for most of the world, reduced the Algerians' agony and fear to anonymous statistics in the news.
But now an Algerian director, Yamina Bachir,
has given a face back to the tragedy in her first feature film,
"Rachida".
And the face is a woman's.
Rachida (played by Ibtisseme Djouadi, an actress with striking green eyes) is a teacher who is beaten nearly to death in the street by a gang of youths after she refuses to plant a bomb in the Algiers school where she teaches.
After leaving hospital, she leaves to slowly master her fears and to start teaching again -- only to have the country's demons rise up around her again, with gruesome, devastating massacre one night.
"I needed to cry out, to express the pain and the anger that was in me," Bachir said in an interview with AFP, explaining that the inspiration for "Rachida" was a real-life teacher who, one day, was indeed beaten in the street for refusing to blow up her pupils.
"In reality, the teacher was killed, like so many other teachers," Bachir said.
"I wanted to bring this woman back to life, to show her daily life, to speak about her courage, but not to make a militant film," she said.
"There were so many murders. I lost people very close to me -- friends, neighbours. But this story especially shook me up."
A film editor married to a director, Mohamed Chouikh, and mother to four children who performed in "Rachida", Bachir said she decided to take up the camera herself because "in the midst of this terrible drama, I needed to speak with the one weapon I had at my disposition: pictures".