Barakat!

Another of the strong films from women directors in this year’s fest, France-based Sahraoui’s pursuit drama brings together two women of different generations and wars. Beautiful Amel is a late twentysomething doctor who, following the abduction of her journalist husband during the Algerian civil war in the early ’90s, heads up to the hills in search of him with a hospital colleague, in fact an active participant of the war of liberation against the French. Sahraoui may show some inexperience developing the relationship between these sisters in struggle, but she has a keen eye for the effects of the contradictory pressures on Algerian women  caught between the rock of Westernising modernity and the hard place of fundamentalist bigotry and sexism.