In his clever and fascinating new documentary Bla Cinima, filmmaker Lamine Ammar-Khodja engages ordinary Algerians in discussions about cinema outside the Sierra Meatra Cinema in a central Algiers square. Mada Masr’s Rowan El Shimi caught the screening at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and then sat with Ammar-Khodja to talk about the practicalities of making such a film and comparing the sociopolitical realities and cinema industries of Cairo and Algiers. While there doesn’t seem to be a screening planned here soon, we’re hoping to hear of one soon.
Rowan El Shimi: Can you tell me a bit about the neighborhood itself and the cinema?
Lamine Ammar Khodja: It’s in the center of the city. It’s very popular, but in Algiers the popular neighborhoods are in the city. It attracted me because cinema is a popular art. That’s what defines cinema. So if it’s popular, we have to go to a popular neighborhood. I’m more interested in these people than in others. I wanted to make the people in this neighborhood characters of a film, because I never see these people in cinema. This was the starting point.
In the neighborhood there is this old theater that was renovated two or three years ago by the Minister of Culture, who had the idea to renovate it to “dynamize” cinemas. So the theaters are in good condition, but nothing happens there. Nobody goes. People lost the habit of going to see movies together. It’s a place people pass a lot. We wanted to make this small square our theater.
RS: How many days were you were filming in the square?
LAK: I was filming for 10 days in a row. You know after shooting, I was thinking – do I have to shoot again or is it sufficient? But I think this film cannot be shot in a different moment, because we created something with the people going there every day.
RS: Yeah – some characters recur throughout the film.
LAK: Exactly, because the people of the neighborhood are always the same. Some pass by because there’s the hospital, the market, the school which are all nearby, but the people of the neighborhood are always there. You see in the film that these people keep coming back to play the game with us because they understood that we are doing something different from the newspapers.
RS: I guess this is the first impression they get when they see the camera – that you’re some kind of cheesy television program coming to ask superficial questions and leave.
LAK: In the beginning they were thinking that, but because we were coming every day and staying from 8 am till 8 pm, they understood that newspapers and television don’t do this. They started realizing that we were doing something different. The idea was just to create this dynamic and see what would happen. So shooting a month later, it wouldn’t be the same film.
RS: The conversations in the film all start out being about the cinema industry, about going to the cinema, what’s socially acceptable to show on screen and whatnot. Then they shift very organically to social and political realities in Algeria. Was your intention to focus on cinema, and then this shift happened as the conversations progressed – or was your intention to use the topic of cinema as an opening to discussing the socio-political realities of Algiers?
LAK: I wasn’t so interested in cinema, but in people. In Algeria people tend not to talk directly. They always use metaphors and symbols. The idea was to use cinema to talk about society like how people talk – indirectly. It looks like it’s talking about cinema but it’s talking about the situation in Algeria now. It’s like a portrait of Algiers.
What we did was always come with a question like: What do you think about cinema, what movies you see, do you go to the cinema, do you see Algerian movies, etcetera? And eventually people answered the question and saw that we were hearing them – really hearing them. We didn’t expect anything from them. Finally they talked about other things. This pattern was the same for all our interviews. In the editing we constructed a narrative line which starts with conversations about cinema, and as the film progresses we forget cinema and move on to other things.
RS: The conversations all start from the same place, but what we see is this fluid edit of what’s seemingly one long conversation with different voices.
There was a point in the film where you meet the police, and you’re filming with the camera down and we see an argument happening there. Is it complicated to get a filming permit? In Egypt it’s so complicated to make a film that involves being on the street and shooting.
LAK: Really?
RS: It’s really complicated. You have to be a member of the Cinema Syndicate. Then you apply for the permit and you have to show your script has been approved by the Censorship Board. When they give you a permit, you have limited shooting days so you have to keep renewing it. Most people opt for making what we now call “illegal films” because of how the laws are set up. But it involves a high degree of risk of confiscation and fines.
LAK: In Algeria it’s easier. We don’t have a cinema syndicate. There is very limited production. We don’t know what’s happening – there’s a lot of money but the people giving it lack transparency. The people who give money for production are also old and are not up to date with today’s film industry. Now they’re trying to change this, but we’ll see what happens. But for permits and so on, it’s really easy. If you have a producer in Algeria or an association you’re working with you can get the permit within 48 hours from when you ask for it by giving the basic information about what you are doing.
RS: So what happened when that policeman came up to you in the film? It seemed to be about the street vendors you were talking to.
LAK: Exactly. They disturb the street vendors but they were very kind to us, telling us to be careful and to come to them if there are any problems.
RS: I didn’t expect that. I just come from a place where there is generally a lack of trust in the police – especially these days.
LAK: In Algeria, it varies. It’s a question of chance and also how you are with them. They deal with you according to your image.
RS: There are bits in the film where you’re talking to a little girl, and she tells you that in the theater they host plays and clown performances. At the end of the film we see a performance by young kids singing the national anthem and dressed in the colors of the flag. They are singing about nationalism, war and Islam – way beyond their age.
LAK: In the film, that theater is used in a metaphorical way. The people who talk about it don’t actually know what’s happening in there. There’s this idea of creating a fantasy of what is happening inside. It really works like the state: we don’t know what’s happening, we have this idea but we don’t know if it’s true or not. The theater symbolizes the state, that’s why we don’t enter it throughout the film. But when we enter at the end of the film, we find a discourse of propaganda inside, very nationalist, which is in complete collision with what we saw on the street before which was more diverse, critical and lively.
RS: It reminded me of Egypt. Your film could easily be about Cairo. It’s the same – when the people automatically ask if you’re television, ask about your foreign camerawoman, the super nationalist discourse inside the theater where they make children say things beyond their understanding.
Also, the situation with street vendors and the police and the part where the young man says cinema is where young couples go to make out and that it’s not a respectable place. In Cairo this happens as well, especially during school hours. I mean cinemas are still frequented by Egyptians – especially during holidays like Eid and school summer break – so it’s not completely isolated from people’s activities like in your film. But it still has romantic connotations.
LAK: Do people also still go to the cinema on weekends or only on official holidays?
RS: Not so much. It’s still pretty expensive for a family outing, even the cheap cinemas. It’s more like a nice special occasion. Also Egyptian films are generally released on holidays, with very few exceptions. Hollywood films are the ones released throughout the year.
Anyway, there were a lot of parallels between the two cities. If you were to make this same experiment in Cairo, I think a lot of similar issues would come up, such as unemployment, housing or government corruption – all themes that I guess are very regional.
Did you show the film in Algeria?
LAK: Yes, but in a small festival outside of Algiers. The public was pretty split on how they received the film, some really liked it but others said, “Why do you show this negative image of Algeria? It’s not the only thing that exists in Algeria.” I guess you know this discourse. I want to do a screening in Algiers.
RS: In the cinema itself?
LAK: That would be great. The film is about taking cinema to the street, so if we then show the film in the cinema it would make a nice cycle.
