ALI AU PAYS DES MERVEILLES

FR 1975 | Director, Script, Camera, Editor, Production: Djouhra Abouda, Alain Bonnamy | Music: Djamel Allam | Colour | DCP of 35mm, restored version | 60 min | arab./french OV with english SUB | Talitha

“Every image was filmed to hit you like a fist”, (Djouhra Abouda, 1979) in this experimental, political and radical film about the experience of immigrant workers in France in the mid-1970s.

ALI AU PAYS DES MERVEILLES (engl.: Ali in Wonderland) by Abouda and Bonnamy calls out the exploitation and racism it unflinchingly ascribes to the French state, the media, capitalism and colonisation in a system of domination that grinds down of those subjected to it.

Shot in 16mm, the film combines a formal and aesthetic inventiveness with a powerful militant purpose, through the direct dialogue of marginalised people. “I have explored the everyday actions of migrant workers through a magnifying glass,” says Djouhra Abouda (Tahar Ben Jelloun, Djouhra et ‘ALI AU PAYS DES MERVEILLES’, Le Monde, 3 January 1977). It took a year of location scouting and research (she reels off a long list of racist crimes from around 1975), as well as painstakingly detailed cinematic effects (jerky shots, distortion, double exposure, time gaps, images in slow and fast motion). Images composed and set to music by Djamel Allam transport us from the realm of documentary to ballet (featuring refuse collection), musical comedy (highlighting weather, hardship and usury), and even fantasy (with superimposed faces on the gravestones of soldiers who died defending France between 1914 and 1918). The film also gives a voice to the forgotten ones: women, hitherto largely absent from films and documents about the struggles of migrant workers.

The film was forgotten and remained invisible, a victim of its non-conformity with the two opposing currents of the day: interventionist (or militant) and experimental cinema, whose contours it had crashed.

After this film, Abouda and Bonnamy abandoned cinema for other forms of expression. (Léa Morin, Il cinema ritrovato)

© Talitha
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Acronyms
amer. American English
b/w Black and white
OV Original version
SUB Subtitles
+SUB electronic live subtitling (below the image)
INT Intertitles
Countries
AT Austria
FRG Federal Republic of Germany (historic)
BLR Belarus
DE Germany
CAN Canada
GDR German Democratic Republic (historic)
EGY Egypt
FR France
GB Great Britain
URY Uruguay
BRA Brasil
SWE Sweden
UKR Ukraine
PL Poland
IDN Indonesia
PRT Portugal
HRV Croatia
ECU Ecuador
HUN Hungary
AUS Australia
IT Italy
MEX Mexico
IND India
Film presentation:
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