Cinema
Leïla et les autres
Sid Ali Mazif · 1977
Synopsis
Meriem, in her final year of secondary school, is promised to a rich man much older than she is, whom she does not know and who sets his conditions. She refuses to have her life settled once and for all by tradition and opposes the negotiations conducted without her. At the same time, Leïla and her fellow factory workers stand up to the foreman's contempt and the paternalism of the male workers, and demand to be held responsible for their work.
Context
The public office produced and distributed this colour feature film, which alternates two stories: that of a final-year schoolgirl and that of a factory worker. It appeared when the country was calling itself socialist without having touched personal status law, and was publicly discussed on its release; it remains a reference in the debates on the family code, adopted seven years later. One scene has remained famous: a friend of the schoolgirl goes out, comes back outrageously made up, and all the girls understand the solution she is proposing. Chafia Boudraa plays the mother, Biyouna a workshop colleague.
Who it is for
A little over an hour, in colour, subtitled, in a tone that is often comic. It should be known that the two stories do not meet and that the film takes sides without hiding it.
Prizes and reception
More than six hundred thousand admissions in Algerian cinemas, and first prize at the Tashkent festival in 1978, where the Union of Soviet Women singled it out.