Year: 2001
Director: Mehdi Charef
Writer: Mehdi Charef
Cinematographer: Alain Levent
Cast: Cylia Malki, Baya Belal, Jean-Roger Milo, Fatima Ben Saidane, Deborah Lamy
Running Time: 101 min.
Although following the form of a “road picture�, Mehdi Charef’s Daughter of Keltoum is at heart an exploration of class and gender oppression in a world virtually untouched by contemporary society.
The Kabyle peoples, the Algerian branch of the Berber nationality that lives primarily in the mountainous region of the north, is a society torn apart by economic misery and an ongoing war that has pitted this non-Arab people against the central Arab authority.
Rallia, a 19 year old Kabyle girl who was adopted by Swiss parents as an infant, returns to the Algerian village where she was born in order to find her mother. After spending a week in the desolate but beautiful mountains, Rallia and herhapless Aunt Nejma set off for the city in search of Rallia’s mother, who works there as a maid. First, they must travel through a world that still clings to tribal mores and strict religious codes of conduct, a land of grinding poverty where women are treated as chattel.
Daughter of Keltoum was featured at the Toronto Film Festival, Karlovy Vary Film Festival and received the SIGNIS Jury Award at the Milan African Film Festival. The Boston French Film Festival declares that Algerian filmmaker Mehdi Charef “achieves a dark and poetic testimony to his roots.” The Minneapolis City Pages adds “meditating on the vastness of the continent, the film creates a dreamlike fusion of what (Paul) Bowles described as the ‘actual desert and [the] inner desert of the spirit.’”
