For her first documentary, Dalila Kerchouche, born in Bias (Lot-et-Garonne), signs a touching film that highlights the way the Republic welcomed those who had engaged by his side.
by Mustapha kess under
Her eyes are “tired, (…) filled with water by dint of crying,” she said. The head either, wrapped in scarves, “is not going well”: the memory of the dead continues to torment it. Yamina Tamazount has a sense of words, as precious as her great age. This lady has seen dramas of history are linked: Algeria in the time of France, the war of independence (1954-1962) and the hell of the Bias camp (Lot-et-Garonne).
This lady married a harki, a fighter engaged in the French army during the Algerian revolution. During these seven years of conflict, between 200,000 and 300,000 auxilions, according to estimates, had been recruited as part of “ordering order operations”. At the end of this war, they were released by the old colonial power. The vast majority remained in this newly independent country, only 90,000 harkis (counting families) were able to leave Algeria to join France.
Once arrived, they were parked for years in closed camps, like that of Bias. In this “refuge”, some 1,300 people were deprived of freedom; Infants died in cold winter and the children were not allowed to go to the school of the Republic. “Why?” Harts Dalila Kerchouche in her documentary Bias, the contempt camp.
barracks without comfort
This journalist was born “behind the barbed wire” of Bias, in 1973. For the past twenty years, she has been working to bring out the memory of the harkis and their descendants. In this film, she delicately tells the daily life of families and hers in comfortless barracks; How much his relatives and neighbors were “confronted with a vacuum”; The suffering also of one of his brothers, who ended up committing suicide, exhausted by the violence of this camp.
Documents in support, she evokes the spoliation of social benefits by the head of the Bias camp, who led half the maintenance of this prison which had the name. She also talks about children kidnapped to their parents to be placed in recovery centers without any explanation.
We try to grasp all the violence described by listening to poignant testimonies – in French and in Arabic – of four women, including that of Yamina Tamazount. “We were people of forgetting,” said one of them. However, these violence remain difficult to conceive: so many mistreatment inflicted by the State seem unreal and incomprehensible. The administration sought to control the life of these harkis until I impose French names on newborns. “We want to integrate when we exclude,” sums up Dalila Kerchouche.
For her first documentary, the director signs a touching and without hatred film, which highlights the drama of the harkis, these French so long despised.