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From this angle exclusively, we read the value of “The Southern Station” (2019 – 96 minutes – Terminal Sud), the sixth film by the French director of Algerian origin, Rabah Amer Zaimish. A political dystopia movie that tries to avoid direct political connection to specific events. Despite aspects of technical weakness that are not hidden, and doubts about the objectives of the financing (Franco-Qatari), as well as the controversy caused by the previous Zaimish film, “The story of Judá” (2015 – in which he exempted the Jews from the charge of conspiring against Christ), yet he punched a hole in a solid wall. It surrounds the human experience of Algerians during the Black Decade in the 1990s. A high and thick wall, the Islamists, the Algerian regime and their French and American partners conspired together to build it high around the pain of millions of victims, as if it were a secret holocaust that has not yet been revealed.
The “Estación del Sur”, which competed for the “Locarno Festival” awards last year and received a special mention in the category of participating international films, and will soon be presented on streaming platforms, is striving through the storytelling and set design to remove viewers from any direct connection to the events of the “Black Decade”, and to accept the film as a work. It records a purely human experience of fear, isolation, and the cruelty of living under totalitarian political regimes. An experiment that can be generalized geographically and temporarily in a contemporary political dystopia tale whose protagonist is the character of a local doctor (reminiscent of the character of the doctor in Camus’s novel “The Plague”, although here he is pessimistic). For the sake of clarity of the brutality of the class struggle, while the mysterious dark forces are waging everyone’s war against everyone else. But the truth is that the viewer can never afford to believe in this fabricated frame, and will immediately begin to read the events in their Algerian form. Zaimich here may have succumbed to financial pressures or sought to expand the fan of watching the film commercially beyond Algerians in exile, but he weakened his film with a naive attempt to sterilize the story framework that did not help the narrative. and the originality of the work diminished.
The pleasure of seeing the “southern station” is not complete without knowing something of the modern history of Algeria, that if it is close and fresh in blood to the Algerians themselves, its details are hidden from the rest of the world – and the people of the East. Arabic – and specialized researchers hardly know them.
The history of Algeria, which has been preoccupied with torments since the French first set foot on its land in 1830, was marked by two intense and tragic moments, the first of which was the War of Liberation (1954-1962), which Although it culminated in victory, it cost the country about a million and a half martyrs, then the “black decade” in the 1990s, which ended with life. The quarter of a million, most of them civilians caught up in a complex conflict whose characteristics were marked by the suffocating economic crisis of the 1980s following the sudden absence of President Houari Boumediene in 1978. At that time, the new president, Chadli Bendjedid, he assumed power on behalf of the military who assumed power after independence. They formed a one-party republic, and their efforts focused on dismantling the tendencies of the Albomadian revolutionary phase to build a Soviet-style socialist industrializing economy, build an alternative economic system on the basis of Western neoliberalism, and open the door to relations. with Washington. However, El-Shazly’s impoverished policies for citizens coincided with a sharp drop in oil prices in a country with a rentier economy. An issue that produced a tremendous social crisis, as the number of unemployed skyrocketed, the purchasing power of citizens eroded and the prices of basic materials doubled, and the separation became explicit and criminal between the wealthy ruling elite and immoral and the impoverished majority, especially with the withdrawal of the state from its formal responsibility for social support, and control of the rich, influential and mafias. The country’s economy. In this explosive atmosphere, the flourishing of Islamic fundamentalism with the efforts of the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States and the governments of Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia found in Algeria a hungry market for an ideology through which it expresses its desperation for the system that has always been covered in socialist, national and populist scales, and its excessive class has never disappeared. The protests began in 1985 before taking a dangerous turn since the “Black October” incident in 1988, when more than 40 people were killed in the repression by security forces of a protest led by an Islamic preacher at the Palace of the Martyrs. in the capital, then 500 people died in a week and capsized. Acts of violence to cover most of Algeria. At the time, the Chadli regime tried to rectify things by calling for fair parliamentary elections. But the first round almost ended in a landslide victory for the Islamists at the expense of the regime’s candidates, which required the intervention of senior army officials after petitioning Paris and Washington and securing the support of the regimes of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. to implement an immediate cancellation of the election results in January 1992, and the transfer of power to a formal president: Muhammad Boudiaf. – who was summoned from exile in a hurry. After that, the country entered a decade of civil war, which some called the “dirty war”, and others called the “black decade” due to the ugliness of the mutual assassinations and killings between the security services and the Islamists, since each side exchanged the other’s tactics to carry out crimes that rarely had to do with politics, elections or with the supposed ideological positions of both sides. At the time, the Algerian regime benefited from the support and cover of France, and the Americans forced the International Monetary Fund to grant Algeria an urgent loan of billions to finance arms and control efforts, and the oil cut. and gas from Algeria was opened to foreign investors. This heated battle between competing interests always took place at the expense of ordinary Algerian citizens, who if they survived free slaughter, kidnapping or torture on both sides, would be consumed by despair, poverty and fear. From the heart of this dark climate emerges the story of the Zaimish South Station doctor, who resists immigration calls and death threats and continues to fulfill his professional duty to all patients who come to him, regardless of their political background and their power or opposition biases. However, times of acute polarization do not accept the idea of a moderate position and place the neutral in one basket and the other party the other way around. Therefore, the doctor, especially after killing the journalist, the brother of his beloved, is dragged into boxes that he does not want and pays a high price for it.
Stunning Visual Paintings Filmed in the South of France
Zaimesh does not put a face to the powers that lead the war of all against all, so they remain mysterious without a known face, with clues for those in power. However, this does not hide the fact that this dystopia has drawn precisely from the well of torments of Algeria.
In “The South Station”, the amateur and rookie leader has matured and devoted himself for the first time since 2002 to directing exclusively without acting, while playing the title role in the presence of the notable French comedian and Franco-Algerian actor Ramzi Bidia, who delivered an influential performance that saved the film from apparent weakness in the time management of events, as well as many digressions. At the expense of an unambitious basic narrative line and useless cultural metaphors.
The photography is influenced by the experiences of French cinema, especially the famous film Z by Costa Gavras, presenting impressive visual paintings filmed in the south of France, hiding behind them a strange fear and painting a contradictory framework for the destinies of the characters heading towards the empty abyss. This rendering gives the film an additional tension that saves it somewhat from boredom by presenting some other details such as torture scenes, hasty movements of the main scenes, unnecessarily dramatic.
The dystopia of the “southern station” is situated in an intermediate zone between films that narrate wars and those that present abstract political experiences, with a mixture of languages, signs and music that intersect in an anonymous place, although preserving an atmosphere Mediterranean. However, the value of the “southern station” as illumination, albeit dimmed, at a time in Algeria’s history has yet to be recorded, either cinematic or historical – with all its mysterious intersections and archives – remains far more important. than its purely technical dramatic content, and any possible evaluation of it with cinematographic tools. The film will be like a bell to wake up all those lazy and cowardly people, perhaps their greed to stop great tragedies – and without meeting the requirements of their professional duty – may push them to reconsider what they have so far overlooked from the stories. of our people who are bloody hearts and minds.
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