GO FORTH

Go forth: the title would leave a bitter taste if Soufiane Adel’s film did nothing more than intercut Super-8 footage, shot by a friend’s father in colonial black Africa, with the memories of elderly Algerians seriously wounded fighting for France in myriad wars. In fact, this rapprochement gives voice and face to a critical view of a still sore French colonial past. In this first-person account in French and Arabic, the filmmaker’s charming seventy-nine-year-old grandmother quickly broaches the subject of political action, and switches from French to Kabyle. The details of the traditional belt she is making become a formal treatise for the filmmaker, who is drawn to anything that can be embedded into her account – even the words of his young uncles, who are keen to comment on their mother’s remarks, neither in nor out of frame. As for the shots of the vast suburban housing blocks that have become topoi of the postcolonial autobiographical documentary, here, they are given new life through the radical choice to film them using a drone. In this alternation of the grandmother’s words, the mix of archive footage and the fresh, non-sociological perspective of the suburbs (social housing as we have never seen it), there is a transaction between what has been given, stolen, abandoned, reclaimed. Finally, the forward movement of the title has the ring of repossession. (Charlotte Garson)