Not to begin my memories of earliest childhood, no, this was a night that caused some imperceptible shift in me at the age of three. As if, because of belonging irrevocably to the family community in a colonized country, one consequently split in two, there would be some sort of alarm set off in the consciousness of this entirely Arab little girl. It was only decades later that I would become aware of its subterranean swell. Let us locate the facts first: I remember this World War as just beginning. Bombing of North Africa by the German air force. Any textbook about this period would give me the precise date, of course—what month in 1940 or 1941, perhaps even later … But I shall rely only on this child’s memory. The scene I want to describe—revive, pass beneath the spotlights, dimmed or blinding, of my sudden new curiosity—this scene takes place in the parents’ room, in this modest apartment in the building where the teachers lived in a village in the Sahel of Algiers. My bed was also in this bedroom—a deep, narrow bed of wrought iron, which I would later use for the bedroom of the heroine of my film.
What do You think about So Vast The Prison (2011)?
