Inch’Allah dimanche

Yamina Benguigui(2001)

France

Genre:

Language: French plus some Arabic/Berber

This film is available as a DVD in the Project Library at Royal Holloway, University of London

Inch'Allah dimanche is the first feature film by acclaimed documentary filmmaker Yamina Benguigui, whose skilful, moving documentary Mémoires d'immigrées (first shown on television in 1997) brought to the attention of a wide viewing public the history of immigration from the Maghreb and its ongoing effects on the lives of first generation migrants and their children living in France. 

This woman-centred film was inspired by Benguigui's mother and the generation of women who followed their husbands to France in the mid-1970s as a result of changes in French immigration laws.  It tells the story of Zouina, who is wrenched from her family in Algeria to join her husband Ahmed in the North of France with her children and mother-in-law, and who is at first virtually imprisoned in her new home by her despotic husband.  Gradually however, she starts to make a life for herself, listening to the radio and meeting her neighbours. When her husband and mother-in-law absent themselves on Sundays to make preparations for Eid, Zouina escapes from the house in search of another Algerian family she has heard of, but discovers that the Algerian woman she had hoped to befriend is shocked by her desire for independence and is not open to change.  Zouina, who has already embraced aspects of French culture, realises that she will have to negotiate her own way in life, accepts a lift from a concerned bus-driver and arrives back home to confront her husband, insisting that in future she will be the one to take the children to school, a demand which he accepts.  The film thus illustrates the tensions within the immigrant Maghrebi family, in particular with regard to the place of women, as well as the necessity for integration if the family is to be accepted.  

The use of film to counter the silence of dominant French cinema with regard to the history of a community in exile is a feature of other films of the late 1990s and early 2000s, including Vivre au paradis, Sous les pieds des femmes, Le Gone du chaâba and 17 Rue bleue.

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