The McMillan-Stewart Fellowship in Distinguished Filmmaking was established at Harvard’s Film Study Center in 1997 with a generous gift from Geneviève McMillan in memory of her late friend, Reba Stewart, to support outstanding Francophone filmmakers from Africa or of African descent. While many recipients have been recognized masters of African and Arab cinema – Ousmane Sembene and Mezak Allouache, for example – the fellowship has also been awarded to directors in the middle of their careers – Mahamet Saleh Haroun, Abdellatif Kechiche and Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche. This time the honor goes to someone who with his first two features has already earned a place in the top ranks of young north African filmmakers: Tariq Teguia.

Teguia was born in Algeria in 1966 and studied visual arts and philosophy in Paris. He began his career teaching contemporary art history and working as a photographer before making a series of short films in the late 1990s. These first works attracted enough attention that Teguia’s feature debut, Rome Rather Than You premiered in film festivals around the world. His follow-up, Inland, won prizes at both Venice and Jeonju.

Teguia’s attention to the relation between characters and the space they inhabit, as well as his penchant for lacunal narrative, betrays the influence of Antonioni and perhaps Jia Zhangke as well. Like them, Teguia has a gift for calm, muted images that nevertheless brim with tension – an appropriately cinematic style for depicting life in present-day Algeria. The country has so far been largely bypassed by the Arab Spring, with the wounds of the civil war of the 1990s still unhealed and with a disempowered and dispirited population overlooked by an unresponsive government and divided over the place of Islam in Algerian society.

The Harvard Film Archive is pleased to welcome Tariq Teguia for his first U.S. retrospective. — David Pendleton