INCH’ALLAH DIMANCHE (2001, Algeria/France, 98 min.), directed by Yamina Benguigui; screenplay by Yamina Benguigui; cinematography by Antoine Roch; edited by Nadia Ben Rachid; with Fejria Deliba (Zouina), Rabia Mokeddem (Aicha, her mother-in-law), Amina Annabi (Malika, her daughter), Anass Behri (Ali, her son), Hamza Bubuih (Rachid, her son), Zinedine Soualem (Ahmed, her husband), France Darry (Mme. Donze, the Neighbor), Roger Dumas (Mr. Donze, the neighbor), Marie-France Pisier (Mlle. Manant), Jalil Lespert (the Bus Driver).  In Arabic and French with English subtitles.

It wasn’t the choice of the women to come.  And, when they came, what was created were shattered, broken families.  They had left their family homes, they didn’t speak French, they came to join a husband that they didn’t know.  Each of them was locked into his or her own misery: the man as a result of his work and his poverty—which the women also came to understand—and the women in their solitude.  --Yamina Benguigui

            It is 1974 or 1975.   The government of then-prime minister Jacques Chirac has reversed the long practice of not allowing the wives and families of Algerian “guest workers” to join their husbands and live in France.  This change will ultimately produce profound changes in French society whose impact is still unfolding.  For the wives who are in the “first wave” to come to France under this new policy, the transition to their new life is particularly difficult.  Most of them come from the rural areas, where they have led very traditional lives with an extended support network (particularly important in the absence of their husbands).  In France it is a different story.  The “pioneers” are scattered, isolated, without friends, often depressed, caught between worlds.  Inch’Allah Dimanche tells the story of Zouina, one of these women.

            The film opens in Algeria, where Zouina and her three children are about to board the boat that will take them to France to join their husband and father, who has been working abroad for ten years.  Accompanying them is Zouina’s domineering mother-in-law, who asserts all her rights of ascendancy over her son’s wife.  She treats Zouina as a servant, finding fault with her continually.  One senses that this might have been bearable back home, where Zouina had her own mother and sisters to fall back on.  But she is about to leave them behind and she seems to know full well what this will mean for her.  In a powerful, heartrending scene, she is torn away from her family and forced onto the boat in a state of high despair.  

            Numb, she arrives at the apartment that her husband has found for them, and we are introduced to the husband, Ahmed.  We realize that Ahmed has not summoned his family out of longing for his wife.  In fact, he showers kisses upon his mother and his children, but has only a cold, perfunctory embrace for his wife.  At first we might think that this is cultural restraint, and his true feelings will be displayed once they are alone together.  This will not be.  Ahmed displays much more fondness for the countryman who has helped move them, and clear regret at having to leave the all-male world of the hostel behind.  He is an interesting character, played very effectively by Zinedine Soualem as a man who is insecure in his skin, trapped in the received roles that he feels he must play:  the dutiful son, the stern father, the dominant husband.  In fact, he is a weak man, ever-conscious of his second-class status in this foreign country, too insecure to relax and be himself with his wife, unable to take Zouina’s side and shield her from his mother’s constant criticism, unable to express feelings whose traces we occasionally see.

            Zouina is beautiful, smart, apparently educated (she seems to understand French well), full of love for her children, and bored.  Unlike her children, who are able to leave home for school, make friends, and begin to integrate themselves in their new world, Zouina must stay at home under the ever-watchful eye and sharp tongue of Aicha.  Her only escape is the radio, and her occasional trip to the local grocer’s, where her naiveté and lack of understanding (along with the grocer’s willingness to extend credit) cause her to spend far more than her husband’s meager earnings can bear.  Not only must she spend her days with a bully at home, but her French neighbor (they shares a contiguous back yard) is a xenophobic nut—the kind of suspicious, obsessive, over-the-top neighbor that the French seem so good at producing.  For Mme. Donze, Zouina and her family represent chaos and the destruction of her well-ordered little kingdom.  For Zouina, Mme. Donze is just another persecutor.  Interestingly, whereas Zouina cannot defend herself against her mother-in-law directly, must simply take her abuse, she is able to lash out at the French woman, and even attacks her physically at one point, in a fit of near-insanity that one senses is directed at Aicha as much as at Mme. Donze—but which only leads to a beating from her husband.

            To the director’s credit, the older women are not simply the caricatures that this description of them might suggest.  There are moments—glances, close-ups, confessions--where we see a little more in them.  Director Yamina Benguigui has suggested that in some ways these women’s stories are intended to parallel Zouina’s.  They too experience their own kind of entrapment.

            The narrative vehicle of the story, the source of the film’s title (literally, “Sunday, God-willing”) occurs when Ahmed decides to purchase a sheep for the upcoming Eid (end of Ramadan) festival.  He and his mother then get into the practice of going to check on the sheep’s progress on Sunday afternoons.  This will give Zouina a brief respite, a chance for her to find a little independence by sneaking off (like a teenage schoolgirl) with her children in search of a rumored Algerian woman who lives somewhere in town, pursuing a dream of friendship, shared confession, real human contact.  It is a strange form of rebellion, but one which makes perfect sense here, and which leads to complications that embody the history and hopes of all those “uprooted” Algerian women to whom Benguigui is paying tribute in her first feature film.

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Yamina Benguigui was born in 1957 in Lille to Algerian parents.  The topic of immigration has marked most of her film work.  She relates that her ambition to be a filmmaker began as a teenager, when she discovered Elia Kazan’s film America, America (1963), the story of a Greek family coming to the U.S., their dreams and their setbacks.  The success of Lakhdar Mohamed Hamina at Cannes for his film Chroniques des années de braise in 1975 also gave her a sense that she too could do this kind of work.  She began her career as an assistant to the director Jean-Daniel Pollet, with whom she worked for four years.  Her first short film was Baton Rouge in 1985, and was followed by a number of documentaries for French television.  Fear and the Veil appeared in 1994.  Her 1997 documentary, Memories of Immigrants (The North African Heritage), was a great popular and critical success in France, and opened the possibility for her to make Inch’Allah.   Before finishing work on that film, she made a further series of short films and documentaries: Pimprenelle (2000), Le Jardin Parfumé (2000), and Pas d’histoire! Regards sur le Racisme au Quotidien (2000).

Inch’Allah Dimanche, her first feature film, tells a story that Benguigui feels is her mother’s story, though her mother had come to France at an earlier point.  One of her chief goals was to make a film with the wonderful Franco-Algerian actress Fejria Deliba.  In the role of the mother-in-law she cast Rabia Mokeddem, a non-professional who seemed to embody exactly the “Queen Mother” that the film needed.  However, not only was she non-professional, she was illiterate, and helping her to learn her lines was a real challenge; in the end, the performance comes across as completely natural and unrehearsed, a tribute to a skilled and patient director.

Inch’Allah Dimanche has won a number of awards at international film festival, including the top prize at Marrakech international Film Festival (presided over by Charlotte Rampling), the FIPRESCI Award winner at the Toronto Film Festival, the Audience Prize and Golden Wave Winner at the Bordeaux International Festival for Women in Cinema, the Special Jury Prize at the Amiens International Film Festival; it was an official selection at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Rendezvous with French Cinema series.  We are proud to be ending the 14^th Festival with the work of this very talented woman.

--Notes by Michael Dembrow

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