Audio transcription

The international success of Back Home confirmed the promise announced by Wesh Wesh. In that film, Ameur-Zaïmeche played an ex-con named Kamel, just back from two years of court-ordered exile in his native Algeria. In this quasi-prequel, the filmmaker also plays a Frenchman named Kamel, a young man deported to Algeria after a prison sentence. As he encounters the country as both insider and outsider, Kamel discovers the pleasures and discontents of life in a land torn between tradition and modernity. Particularly in his interactions with women in his small home village, Kamel comes face to face with the differences between his secular life in France and the prominence of Islam in Algeria. – DP