Climbing the Mountains - Anali s Idurar
Spring Grants 2024 - Production Stage
Sabrina Chebbi / Feature Documentary / France, Algeria, Germany, Qatar / 80 min / Original Language: Arabic, French, Kabyle / Interests: Documentary
Synopsis
Sabrina is an Algerian-French filmmaker born in Kabylia, a mountainous region in the east of Algiers. In 1991, at the start of the black decade, both her parents, teachers and activists for the Berber cause, left Algeria for France when Sabrina was 4 years old. They settled in Normandy and became greengrocers. In autumn 2020, when the French authorities imposed a curfew during the Covid pandemic, Sabrina often had the same dream of being chased by the police. When she recounts her vision to her parents, stranded in Algeria by the closure of the borders, it reminds them of their own childhood nightmares during the War of Liberation, with the French army in place of the police. Convinced that these nightmares belong to a family memory that has not been passed on to her, Sabrina decides to return to Algeria with her camera to gather the words of the women in her family who took part in the fight for independence. Through their testimonies and traditional songs, she aims to bring back a buried memory and reconnect with a culture and language from which she was brutally cut off as a child.
Credits
- Director
- Sabrina Chebbi
- Screenwriter
- Sabrina Chebbi
- Producer
- Sabrina Chebbi, Jil Adriana Winter, Fabien Dao
- Production Company
- Idurar production, Winter Dreieck, Asaru Production, 444Films
About the Director
Sabrina Chebbi is an Algerian-French producer and director of documentary films. She entered the world of cinema as a self-taught documentary filmmaker in 2013. Her initial work aims to change the representations of the descendants of immigrants in France. She directed and self-produced 'Les Coups de leurs Privileges,' a film about police murders that went unpunished in France, which was broadcast in seven countries across Europe and Latin America for four years. She then completed a Master's degree at the University of Montpellier 3 with Ateliers Varan, where she trained in documentary filmmaking. Since then, she has made other short films. She runs workshops on representations in cinema and regularly works as a consultant on third and decolonial cinemas. 'Climbing the Mountains' is her first feature-length documentary.