Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche is one of the most original Maghrebian cinematic voices to appear in the past couple of decades. Although he has directed a single film in the area – the wonderful Bled Number One (2006), which tells the story of a wayward son returning from Europe back to his Algerian village - Ameur-Zaïmeche has, in time, constructed an oeuvre that is dotted with echoes of this double culture, giving birth to a proteiform space which is both phantasmatic and heavily rooted in the multicultural realities of contemporary France. The director’s debut was the 2003 feature Wesh wesh, qu’est-ce qui se passe?, a “suburban” film that is angry and violent, as seen through the eyes of an Arab community that has already grown beyond the first generation of children born on French soil. Ever since then, Ameur-Zaïmeche has experimented by revisiting the final days of Jesus Christ (Histoire de Judas, 2015), which resulted in a film that is not inasmuch flippant, but which is still somehow closer to being a sample of slow cinema that pays close attention to the surrounding space and with the visages that inhabit it, rather than being preoccupied with Christian exaltation, which is heavily deflated. Set in the near future, his most recent effort, Terminal Sud (2018), starring Ramzy Bédia as the lead character, imagines an eerie Arabic-French state, a territory caught in the mires of civil war, in which everything is bathed in the burnt, sickly lights of a merciless Mediterranean sun.

Victor Morozov

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Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. He studied film theory in Grenoble, Paris, Dublin.

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