La Fille de Keltoum/Bent Keltoum/The Daughter of Keltoum
Mehd Charef (2001)
France, Belgium, Tunisia
The sixth feature film by beur director Mehdi Charef, it is the first to be set in his native Algeria. It appeared shortly after Abdelkrim Bahloul's L'Autre monde, another film which returns to the director's homeland for its setting (a choice made possible by the cessation of a decade of terrorist violence in Algeria). In each case, the film centres on a young woman who 'returns' to her country of origin on a quest. In the case of La Fille de Keltoum, it is ostensibly the quest for the birth mother who abandoned her for adoption at the end of the war of independence.
The film's angry, young, westernised Swiss beur heroine, Rallia, first spends time with her crazy aunt and family in an arid mountain village, then travels across Algeria in search of her mother, Keltoum, who works at a seaside resort. In the course of her journey, accompanied by her aunt, she discovers the barbaric treatment to which Algerian women are subjected and becomes alienated from both the country and the aunt. When she finds Keltoum, however, she discovers that the aunt is in fact her mother, having been raped by a soldier and gone out of her mind; the baby was sold to pay for the family to have access to water. The film is thus critical both of the government of the newly independent Algeria in the past and of the misogynistic Islamic patriarchal system in the present. However, its political impact is undermined by the often inexplicably vacuous behaviour of its female protagonist, who leaves the country almost as soon as she has been reconciled to her true mother.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 30 May 2006 •
I find this film very interesting in the context of ‘home-seeking journeys’, a theme common to many post-migrant/diasporic films. What struck me is that Rallia’s return to her ‘roots’ results in complete disillusionment. “In my dreams the mountains were a paradise. Its inhabitants the princes”, she says. But what she actually finds is a a country of savage natural beauty and a society in which women are oppressed. Although she overcomes the trauma of having been abandoned as a baby by her mother, discovering that her true mother’s trauma of loss drove her to insanity, Rallia is unable to fully identify with her roots. Her mother Nedjma is insane and part of a culture that is entirely alien to Rallia. Thus Rallia’s return to her roots does not result in a full reconciliation.
Comment posted by Daniela Berghahn on 02 Jun 2006 at 05:49 PM
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