Original subtitles

CALENTURE, from the Latin calēre, FROM THE QUALITY OF BEING WARM.

The lexicon dates from the 16th century,

in the context of the first ultramarine voyages.

It means FEVER, HYPERTHERMIA.

A phrenic delirium that spontaneously strikes mariners

during long journeys

in extremely hot latitudes,

particularly near the equator or heading toward the Tropics.

The calentura occurs during the night while the mariner is asleep:

the individual wakes up lost and runs onto the deck of the ship.

There, he imagines, amidst the waves breaking on the high seas,

trees, forests and meadows adorned in flowers;

He rejoices at this mirage, with a thousand joyful exclamations:

he shows a burning desire to throw himself into these meadows.

As if his mission had at last been accomplished.

If the other mariners are not sufficient in agility or numbers

to oppose the whim of this madness, his death is certain.

MARINER OF THE MOUNTAINS.

January 12, 2019.

Dear mother,

I'm writing to you from the middle of nowhere.

I'm in the middle of the Mediterranean,

in a rusty-old tub of an Algerian vessel.

Twenty hours from now,

Algeria will cease to be a blindspot in my mind

and will take on smells, colours and forms of its own.

And you won't be by my side to see what it's like,

this place that has haunted us all our lives.

If you were with me, we'd have taken a plane.

Alone,

I prefer to do the crossing by sea.

I potter around,

wondering why it took me so long to make this trip.

I'm hit with this anxiety to get this trip over with, and go home;

to stop thinking about all this.

I've spent 54 years thinking about this.

Ladies and gentlemen,

passengers of the cabin class are invited to the dining room.

Ladies and gentlemen,

passengers of the cabin class are invited to the dining room.

Enjoy your meal, thank you!

Not long out of Marseille, dinner was served.

The same menu for everyone:

tasteless chicken, with sour cream sauce,

some form of rice, fries, and an orange-flavored soft drink.

Whenever you spoke of traveling by boat,

you'd evoke the stink of engine grease,

and how it made you vomit.

I'm exhausted and I try to sleep. But it's impossible.

There's this constant dripping from the sink of this tiny cabin.

But I don't want to arrive in Algiers a wreck,

so I close my eyes and end up nodding off.

I dream of you,

like I've been doing since I decided to make this trip.

In this dream,

I see someone breaking into our backyard.

I run to you and try to tell you, but you don't see anyone.

I'm scared, I start to shout,

but you can't hear me.

Suddenly, you're standing there, pregnant, in a cargo plane.

The plane is noisy as hell, with groaning metal.

Suddenly you land on a beach covered with palm trees.

You run towards the water, a huge wave crashes on the rocks,

and drenches you with fronds of red seaweed,

the same seaweed you used to research.

I wake up with an image of you pregnant,

standing in the sea, smothered in seaweed.

I can't get back to sleep.

Iracema,

my imaginary travel companion.

It's 7:58 AM

the day I saw Algiers for the first time.

I spend ages waiting at Customs.

When it's my turn, I show my passport.

The officer asks my name.

He understood it straight away.

It was the first time in my life I didn't have to spell my name.

He asks me where I'm heading to.

I say I'm stopping by Algiers and then I'm off to Kabylia.

He looks quizzical, asks if I have relatives in Kabylia.

I change the subject.

I say I'm a journalist doing a story for a Brazilian TV channel.

He smiles, and asks if I know Zidane.

Little does he know how much I detest football.

The taxi driver says it is 8ºC outside.

The cold here reminds me of Fortaleza.

What a hot city.

At midday, we feel our ears will burst into flames.

Growing up, I used to think we were different,

with this Kabyle name nobody could pronounce.

We were the only Aïnouz: you and I.

It was strange not knowing my father.

But I also loved imagining we were special.

As if we belonged to a secret clan.

Onto an extraordinary mission in Latin America,

waiting for a secret agent to arrive from a very distant place,

from a mysterious land.

I take a shower to wash off the brine of the sea.

I order room service

I end up eating a cold cheese sandwich

while looking out the window.

There's a huge monument in the middle of the city.

I wonder what is this monument.

I know so little about this place.

When I was a kid, I was curious about it.

As I got older I stopped caring about this Algerian clan, this Kabylia,

this faraway place, across the sea,

from where this father kept sending postcards.

I called my father a few days before I left.

We hadn't spoken in a while.

I wanted to be the one to tell him I was coming,

before he found out on his own.

He wanted to come along.

He, who never told me much about this place,

who never invited you to visit the place where he was born.

I told him I'd rather take this trip by myself.

With you.

Hello. What are you doing?

Very well, I'm Brazilian.

- Brazilian? - My father is Algerian,

and it's my first time here in Algeria.

- Welcome. - Thank you.

- So I'm recording some footage. - Footage of Algeria?

Yes. For me.

- For you? To keep? - Yes.

Maybe I'll do something with it, because it's the first time.

I'm filming.

- You come often to Algeria? - First time.

- First time? - Yes, yes.

- First time? - It's my first time, yes.

- In French? You speak French? - Yes.

Oh it is quite something, not bad.

- It's beautiful, right? - It is fascinating.

- Can I take a look? - Yes, go ahead.

- Yes, I don't see well so. - Look.

- Is it filming everything? - Yes, yes.

- Is it film or digital? - It's digital.

- Where are you from? - Brazil.

- Brazilian. I salute you. - Thank you. Likewise.

- Oscar Niemeyer. - Yes.

I came across a bunch of street typists.

I think they fill out forms for people.

You didn't tell us you were coming with a friend.

I remember the sound of the typewriter in your office.

When I left Fortaleza you wrote me almost every week.

Phone calls were very expensive.

The day I cleaned out your apartment, I found a lot of old letters.

But I never found the ones you exchanged with my father,

from when you two arrived in the United States.

You in Madison,

and him, in Colorado.

You told you won the Madison Post Office prize.

In one month, I think at the end of 1962,

you received more letters than anyone else in the whole city.

I've often wondered what you two wrote to each other so much.

You telling him about your seaweed,

your roommates,

how much you missed your sister Jamacy,

your mother Branca,

and the heat of Fortaleza.

And him, telling you about the snow-capped mountains of Colorado,

a road trip to Las Vegas,

and the small house he'd found for the two of you to live together.

Or were you talking about the situation in Brazil,

with a military coup looming on the horizon?

And he'd tell you of a new era in Algiers,

of the Independence celebrations that seized the streets.

I'll never know what was in those letters.

You burnt them all before you died.

I'm tired,

but I don't want to sleep.

Two men approached me.

They wanted to know where I came from.

They thought it odd that a Brazilian was out alone at night in Algiers.

Just give me 50 dinars' worth.

Yes, a cup.

You pour it from one cup into the other.

Yes, it's like that under the tents.

I am telling you, you have to see it.

It's good?

I decide to head back to the hotel, but realize I'm lost.

I end up in another square, where guys are singing and dancing.

We Algerians, we love joy. We love freedom.

We love freedom.

Freedom is the only thing we have left.

Iracema,

if I'd found my way back to the hotel,

I wouldn't have stopped here,

where the ghost town, becomes a cheerful town full of life,

where Algiers the White

became Algiers...

the Red.

I slept like a log until late.

If you were here,

we'd have woken early.

Since it was past noon,

breakfast was over at the hotel.

I went out to find to something to eat.

I listened to conversations I couldn't understand

as a man started staring into the camera, all wary.

He was cross-eyed, he had a glassy eye.

Do you remember the first time you took me to the ophthalmologist?

I was 9.

The doctor diagnosed me with keratoconus.

A cornea deformation.

A congenital disorder.

You assured him no one in our family suffered from that condition.

You probably thought it came from my father's side.

It must have been odd

raising a son without knowing his other half.

I decided to visit the monument I spotted from my hotel window,

the Martyrs' Memorial,

built to honour the heroes who died fighting the French army.

It seems over a million people died in the war.

I wondered if the weight of all the dead

would outweigh the cement used for this monument.

I was taking pictures in the outskirts of Algiers,

when this elderly man came up and introduced himself.

He was a retired fisherman.

He comes here every evening to have a smoke, gazing at the sea.

After I told him I'm a journalist, he told me he fought on the front.

He pulled out his ID and stated, proudly,

he still knows how to shoot with an AK103.

He showed me a scar where a bullet grazed his head.

He said he lost both parents, his brothers and a sister in the war.

He must be over ninety.

About the same age you'd be if you were still alive.

- Hello. - Hello.

- How are you? - I'm very well and you? How are you?

In Algeria, there are a lot of problems.

At least the harbor is well maintained.

Smoke, smoke, smoke...

no good, smoke, smoke, no good.

- There is no work. - No, no work.

No work.

After the old man left, three guys came up to me,

they wanted to tell me about their lives,

which consist of looking at the sea, dreaming of getting away.

One of them, the one in the Gucci cap, is 23.

He's tried to leave Algeria 8 times, and was deported back 8 times.

He tells me something that haunts me.

He wished the French had never left.

Iracema,

I want to understand what he feels.

If it's rage towards the present,

or if it's the anger of being haunted by a past drenched in blood?

Maybe he isn't thinking of the past, he wants to have faith in the future.

The boys leave and I stay, staring at the sea.

It feels like I'm no longer in Algiers,

but I'm in Fortaleza.

It was one Sunday at the beach,

when I inquired about my father for the first time.

I think I was 8.

Instead of telling me the story of my father,

you told me the story of the novel Iracema,

The forbidden love between a Tabajara native

and a Portuguese colonizer,

which bears the first Brazilian child

and ends in tragedy.

Your eyes were glued to the sea,

and I could sense your fierce desire to cross the Atlantic,

in order to arrive here

where I am now.

Did your decision to sequence the DNA of a red seaweed

had something to do with a yearning to wade into the ocean

and come out on the other side of the world?

It was that red seaweed that earned you a scholarship

to leave to the United States.

How could something you could only see under a microscope,

change someone's life forever?

I picture your heart

when you embarked on a plane from Fortaleza to Washington.

I know one thing.

It was on a bowling outing with the other foreign students,

when you met my father.

He left Kabylia to study engineering in America

so he could return to rebuild a free Algeria.

I wonder if on that first night you talked in French

or in English.

Then you both left Washington.

You moved to Madison and him to Colorado.

You spent months exchanging only through letters.

The same letters that earned you the Post Office Prize.

It was 1963, once you finished your Master's Degree,

that you moved to Colorado.

I never saw you two together,

except on the photos that you kept from that time.

Like in a love story with Audrey Hepburn and Jean-Paul Belmondo.

I wonder how you felt when you said goodbye.

You, pregnant, returning to a Brazil taken over by the military

and him embarking to the Mecca of Revolution,

to Independent Algeria.

You had a farewell kiss and he promised he'd come back for you,

to start a life together, here.

You, him and I.

Or maybe not.

Maybe nothing was said, there was no farewell kiss.

There were so many things I wanted to ask you.

Were you still waiting for him, that day, in Fortaleza,

while gazing at that chopping sea?

Did you still dream of coming here?

Were you still in love with him?

I don't think so.

When you told me the story of IracemaI think you'd had enough of Algeria,

of Kabylia, of Majid

and of this whole thing.

Was it on that very day that my desire to make this voyage was born?

Before I knew it, it was almost night

and I was still here, looking at the sea.

I've noticed they speak a different language here.

I don't know if it's Kabyle, Berber or Tamazight.

Once again, someone asks where I come from,

and takes a picture of me.

And I keep asking myself how do they know I'm a foreigner.

The owner was impressed when I said I was a journalist.

He offers me freshly squeezed orange juice.

It was good.

I was sick of sodas and cartoned stuff.

I have finally arrived in Kabylia. It feels like another world.

I decided to stop at this lake,

which I'm not sure if it's a lake or a reservoir.

While filming,

I wondered if one of these kids could be my distant relative,

a second or third degree cousin.

Portuguese, it's like Spanish, right?

Portuguese is nicer.

I speak Spanish.

I understand, no problem.

My name is Katia.

Your name is Katia?

You enjoy Algeria?

- Beautiful country. - Very beautiful.

So sir, you are in Algeria for how many times before?

When you come to Algeria? One day?

A couple of days ago.

Then your documentary is gonna be ready when?

- Next year. - Next year?

Can you tell us the title, so we can find it and watch it.

- When will it be out? - I don't know yet.

How did I think I could be a cousin of one of those kids?

As if Kabylia were one big family.

I ended up in a village called Beni Yenni.

Traditionally, they were swordsmiths here

because of the surrounding silver mines.

When the Arabs forbade it, the locals started making jewelry instead.

If you were here, you'd have bought a lot of them.

I remember a coral necklace you had,

but rarely wore, because you were against coral harvesting,

which messed the ecosystem of your red seaweed.

It struck me that your birthday would be in the coming days.

I get the urge to buy a necklace to give you as a gift.

I started to choose then I heard you saying:

"Don't be silly, Karim. Keep it in your savings account".

The jeweller asked me what I was doing here.

I told him I was lost, I was looking for Tagmut Azuz,

the village where my father was born.

He said it wasn't far from here.

He asked if my father was alive. I said yes,

he lives in Paris and has a place in Algiers.

He asked if my father was with me.

I said no, that I don't see him often

and wanted to make this trip alone.

I decide to get a haircut,

not that I have much hair left.

You'd have hated it.

You always complained that I got my hair cut too short,

that it made me look like a soldier.

I wanted to look more like them

so they'd stop asking me where I come from

and what I'm doing here.

I saw a woman with a scarf on her head.

I wanted to go over and talk to her,

as if she were you,

as if you'd come to live here,

and were staring at these mountains, remembering Fortaleza's seascape.

I thought I had come to Kabylia,

in search of something that might make me better understand who I am,

some answer that I can give when I'm asked where I come from.

But everything I see around here makes me think of you, Iracema.

Today, more than ever,

I miss you so much.

I found a recently built hotel nearby.

The room is big, with two single beds.

The shower is ice cold,

the towels were folded into a bunny-like shape.

And the mattress is too soft.

What would it have been to live in a country becoming so conservative?

Would you have agreed to give up your red seaweed

and to live on top of these mountains,

away from the sea?

I doubt it.

If you were here with me, we would be relieved

that Majid never came back to take us away with him.

I was happy living with you and my grandmother at 880 Santana Jr. Av.,

in the Papicu neighborhood.

Going to the beach every weekend.

Were you also happy?

At breakfast, I notice some old pictures of Kabylia on the wall.

They were certainly taken by a French traveler

depicting the Kabyles as exotic tribe,

savage and ancestral.

I imagine how was the life of these people

who have been living in these mountains for centuries,

since long before the French invaded.

How was the life of my grandfather,

of my great-grandfather,

of my great-grandmother?

I'll never forget my arrival in Tagmut Azuz.

Make beautiful images of me and Kabylia.

Suddenly, a woman opens the door and comes out of her house.

She looks me in the eye and says:

"Make our Kabylia look beautiful."

I think my haircut must have worked.

This woman thinks I'm really from here.

I spot a boy walking to school and ask if I can take his picture.

I try to get him in the frame wondering how it would have been

if this had been my own daily walk to school.

Would I have moved to Algiers and become an engineer?

Would I have found a wife and had twin kids to raise?

And dreamt of living in Zürich?

Or maybe I'd never have left this village

until I reached 54

when I'd have travelled to Fortaleza

to see where my Iracema was born?

I'd be now, staring at the Atlantic, wondering how my life would have been.

Can you imagine?

It would have been my life inside out.

Hello.

For the first time, nobody is paying attention to me.

I feel like a spy, disguised as a Kabyle.

Everyone here could be a sibling of my genitor,

which is how you started to call him after a certain point.

What would it have been like had I met my father here,

instead of a café in Paris?

I remember,

he was waiting for me at a table outside,

squeezed onto a narrow sidewalk.

A stranger, in a navy-blue suit & tie, sitting across from me.

I was 18.

I grew up imagining Majid as a cross of Yuri Gagarin and Che Guevara.

He was neither.

He was an ordinary man.

An engineer married to an Algerian, with whom he had a daughter.

He didn't look like a member of a secret clan,

who grew up in the mountains, and survived many wars.

So many years wanting to ask him so many questions

suddenly we didn't have much to say to one another.

We finished our coffee, said goodbye

and I rushed to call you.

I wanted to tell you everything, but you didn't want to know.

You changed subjects.

Today, I understand it must have been awkward for you,

my meeting the man with whom you'd dreamt of a shared life,

and whom you never saw again.

Today I think I understand you, Iracema.

I understand I'll never grasp the extent of what you lived together.

And then a well-dressed gentleman approached me.

I think he'd been following me since I left the café.

Hello.

He caught me so off-guard

that when he asked my name, I didn't lie.

He laughed and went to get a man who introduced himself excitedly.

My name is Aïnouz Karim.

I was born on August 15th 1966, in Tagmut Azuz.

I am a businessman.

Pleased to meet you, the second Mr. Aïnouz Karim.

Pleased to meet you.

Look, Aïnouz Karim.

And these are my children. There you go.

He even showed me his ID to prove we were born in the same year.

Pleased to meet you. Thank you.

Can you imagine how it felt, after thinking you were one of kind,

to arrive in a small village on top of a North-African Mountain,

and be introduced to my doppelgänger.

In one minute he introduced me to the whole village.

Welcome to our home, in the heart of Kabylia.

Long live Kabylia.

Kabylia, my beautiful country.

We are proud of you.

It's a pleasure.

Good morning.

How are you?

Have you seen your brother?

Aïnouz?

Not him.

The one that lives there.

Have you seen that tree?

This tree is more than a century old.

I've advised him to seek an elder to answer him.

- What do you want me to say? - No, you are right.

- You need an elderly person. - Yes an elder is best.

- Yesterday he was in the square. - I saw him at a café.

He was taking pictures of the At-Azzouz district.

- He is U-Yidir At-Bouzid's grandson. - Yes, but I don't know him.

Me neither.

An elder who knows the village could answer his questions,

explain why we gave this district the name At-Azzouz.

What do you want me to tell him? I told him the name of the alley.

That's the end of the story.

This house belongs to a woman

who might be my cousin or my aunt.

He is French.

- Who is he? - He's family.

How do you know?

How do you know he's family?

- He's Aïnouz. - Yes.

- God bless him. - How are you?

She introduced me to her daughter, to her niece and even her grandson,

the same boy I met on his way to school in the morning.

Some of them spoke a little French, but it was hard to communicate.

It's someone from our family who's here to film us.

He's from the Aïnouz family. From my mother's side.

Yes he's an Aïnouz.

The children are curious.

- He said yes. - Thanks a lot.

Yes because he's French. My French is bad.

No my daughter, he's an Aïnouz. He's not French.

Maybe he's only called Aïnouz.

Yes, maybe he only calls himself Aïnouz to coax us.

- Karim Aïnouz? - Yes, Aïnouz Karim.

- On the internet. - Yes that's it.

You'll see there are plenty of photos.

Tell me, is the movie going to be on TV?

No, in movie theaters, not on TV.

Movie theaters? Oh, okay. At the cinema.

- Abroad? - What do you mean?

Ah, so it won't be on TV for us to see?

It should be aired in Algeria so we can see it.

My sister wants to know

if it's possible to put it on Facebook?

On Facebook.

So with these photos I'll be in the USA, Tunisia, Zimbabwe.

Switzerland.

He's only filming me. I only have to smile.

What do you want me to say? I'm waiting for my fate.

Me, the state I'm in, what do you want me to say? Nothing.

I only have my eyes left to cry.

He's not a stranger. He's my brother-in-law.

Tell him it's for the day he comes back.

She's saying when you come back she'll fill you up with cakes.

He said okay.

Tell him that my sister will offer him a box.

She'll give you a big box.

She says you'll have a big box of cakes and a wife too.

- He's kidding. - She doesn't have a daughter for him.

She's a young woman. Come on, use the wall to help you walk.

If she walked assiduously, in 6 days I'm sure she'd lose weight.

Who is he, why is he filming us?

I don't know.

- Wait, I'm going to stop here a bit. - Who's this person filming us?

I have no idea who this could be.

- We're here, take your picture. - No, don't take my picture.

I don't know where these photos will end up.

Let me through, don't take my picture.

- What's going on here? - What's this photo business?

- Wait, I'll explain it to you. - He's an Aïnouz.

An Aïnouz? Who are his parents?

His grandfather is called Idir and his father Majid Aïnouz.

Okay, I see.

He's his son, he was born abroad.

And now he wants to take our Tagmut Azuz with him.

He wants to know see his village.

Tell him, Tagmut Azuz is better than Paris.

He came all the way to the village to film.

Yes, he came to film.

He wants to get back to his origins and keep up traditions. That's good.

God bless you. Shall I make you some coffee?

Do you want a coffee?

Here.

My children are happy. They say you will take my picture.

You're part of the family.

You're my uncle's son. We're from the same family.

We're all Aïnouz.

It was my aunt who married me into this family. Do you see him?

She married me off to an old alcoholic.

He's always drinking.

He's always begging. It's shameful. It's too much.

Wait, I'm going to give a banana to uncle Idir's grandson.

Wait.

I only have two.

There they are.

Give them to uncle Idir's grandson.

Let's take a picture. Come on, get up.

Come on.

Come on. Come.

I need to be in it.

Oh yes, put yourself like that.

This is Mister Ayouni.

Yes, Mister Ayouni.

Ah it's okay.

And there they are.

Mister Ayouni and Misses Ayouni.

Come on, come on.

This other relative said I perhaps had a right to some land here.

I never thought about it before,

but suddenly I started thinking that maybe I could live here,

restore one of these old houses,

grow a bunch of grape vines, make wine,

and open a nightclub.

It was a reverie that popped into my head all of a sudden.

A wish to start all over again

and to become Karim Aïnouz upside-down,

who was born in Tagmut Azuz,

who lives in the mountains,

and who is a nightlife impresario.

May God protect and unite you.

It's over.

Long life to you.

Long life to you, for you to discover the world.

She tells me I must meet my great-uncle.

She makes a point of taking me to his house.

That's a Kabyle lemon tree.

That's a mature fig tree.

He shows me each plant, and describes every tree.

This is a pomegranate tree.

Here, even the lemon tree is Kabyle.

This is a plum tree.

That's an avocado tree.

That's a persimmon.

The one over there is a four seasons lemon tree.

Over there is a mandarin tree, the clementine.

That there is an orange tree.

By the way, there are fruits.

Close the door, Djou.

He invites me in, he wants to prepare me a couscous.

I say I can't, but he insists.

He says our surname means "generous".

No, he says that my name means "generous".

I don't think you ever knew that.

He tells me about my grandfather, Idir.

Your grandfather

was a very bright man

with an elephant's memory.

At first,

he married a cousin of his,

they had a son,

and then I don't know what happened,

it was love at first sight

he met your grandmother.

My grandfather got married, had a son and then abandoned his wife.

Just like your story with my father.

He fell in love with my grandmother, with whom he had five children.

He says that my grandparents taught Math at a school nearby.

He tells me my grandfather was a revolutionary,

who was persecuted and tortured by the French.

He was part of the first government after the War of Independence,

he ended up being exiled after a coup d'état

launched from within the same party that led the Revolution.

He was expelled from Algeria,

the country he'd fought so hard for,

nurtured such dreams for,

and to which he could never return.

No wonder the National Anthem sings about so much bloodshed.

Come on.

After the couscous,

my great-uncle invites me to visit the house where the Aïnouz were born.

It's good.

Alright, let's go.

He tells me that here in Tagmut Azuz

that the Catholic Missionaries opened their very first school in Algeria.

He tells me that my father and grandfather went to that school.

My uncle tells me that my grandfather and father were born in this house.

This house was occupied and split in two,

so these blasted missionary priests could live here.

According to my uncle,

a Frenchman wrote that the first conquest of Algeria

was achieved with the bullets of the French army

and the defusing of the Kabyle resistance.

The second conquest was achieved by enforcing a colonial administration.

And the third and ultimate conquest,

was achieved through the Missionary Schools.

But to the colonizers' dismay,

these schools were never enough to prevent the uprisings.

I remember a passage from a book I brought on this trip,

The Wretched of the Earthby Frantz Fanon.

Page: 34. Chapter: Concerning Violence.

"Thus the native discovers that his life, his breath,

"his beating heart are the same as those of the colonizer.

"He finds out the colonizer's skin is of no more value than a native's.

"And this revelation unsettles the world.

"All the revolutionary assurance of the native stems from it.

"For if, in fact, my life is worth as much as the colonizer's,

"if his glance no longer shrivels me up nor freezes me,

"if his voice no longer turns me into stone,

"I'm no longer on tenterhooks in his presence.

"I'm already preparing such efficient ambushes for him

"that very soon there will be no way out but that of flight."

REVOLUTION UNTIL VICTORY.

I try to imagine what this house was like before

versus what it is now.

It's a small place, Iracema.

It must have been a shock to leave here for Colorado.

It's her, it's not me, it's her.

My grand-uncle's three granddaughters, my cousins,

goof around and look at me.

The oldest is called Ines.

She volunteers to carry the camera.

She stands behind me, by my side, attentive.

It's funny.

It almost seems she was waiting for me.

She asks me if I want to hear a story.

I say yes.

She looks into the camera and tells me

of the creation of the world as in the Kabyle mythology.

Machaho! Tellem chaho! Once upon a time.

This is the device that has opened Kabyle stories since bygone times.

The age old formula that opens the doors

onto a world so strange and yet familiar,

where we see marvels, as in our dreams,

or our desires are brutally frustrated like in reality.

Once upon a time there was a wild buffalo,

Itherther,

and a heifer,

Thamuatz.

They lived in the depths of the Earth where no light ever reached,

a place called Tlam.

Tlam was a dank, dark netherworld,

replete with subterranean streams.

Until one day,

Thamuatz falls into one of these rivers

and Itherther decides to follow her.

The underground river disgorges into a valley.

Itherther and Thamuatz

emerge and gaze at the light for the first time.

Blinded by an explosion of lights,

they climb the Atlas Mountains in order to reach the sun.

And up on the highest peak, they conceive Achimi,

the buffalo that gave rise to all the creatures of the world.

Iracema,

at that moment, I feel as though I came here just to meet my cousin.

Ines.

I am a ghost.

It was as if she were your doppelgänger.

While everybody wants to tell me about the past, war, revolution.

Ines told me about a myth.

A story from when the world wasn't even the world yet.

It makes me want to make a movie with her.

2021: THE ODYSSEY OF INES.

Once upon a time

the crew of a spaceship encounters

an alien vessel in deep space.

Ines, one of the teenage cosmonauts,

flees the spacecraft into the unknown

and she drifts into the void.

Ines embarks on a new journey to a distant galaxy named Amda.

My uncle asks me if I've been to the cemetery.

I say I haven't.

He makes a point of taking me there.

I realize that I had passed by it once.

There's a huge tree in the middle.

As though everyone who had died there was now part of that huge tree,

as if it were nourished by the dead.

Most of the headstones bore the same surname:

Aïnouz.

For the first time, I actually felt I had understood this place.

Will I finally be able to explain that I also come from here?

Suddenly it all started to tremble as if I were on the edge of a cliff.

I felt hollow. A kind of vertigo.

I was afraid I'd fall into a grave and never come out again.

The night has fallen when I leave.

My uncle insists that I stay. I tell him I'm booked into a hotel.

It's a lie. The desire to stay here longer just grows,

and I feel drawn to that tree in the middle of the cemetery.

I'm afraid I'll never be able to leave these mountains.

So, without saying goodbye to anyone, I head back to Algiers.

It's dark, and I don't know what I'm doing.

I retrace my route,

back down the mountains towards the sea.

Back in Algiers, I drive by a shopping mall and decide to stop.

I need a familiar place,

somewhere I can pretend I'm not here anymore.

I take the escalators until I come across a bowling alley.

I ask for an hourly rate, and start to play.

I don't know if anyone notices me, because I'm long passed caring.

I barely hit any pins, but I don't care.

I think about you doing the same,

laughing and having fun,

long before I was born,

wanting to devour life.

I wake up the following morning with the singing of children.

I look out the window and see that the hotel is next to a school.

From this new room I can clearly hear the children singing the Anthem.

I think about the War of Independence I didn't experience,

but which allowed me to be born.

It was this War that cracked open the horizons of this country,

and allowed Majid to go to America, where you two could fall in love.

And it was to this Revolution that he came back

when he said farewell to you.

I'm proud to have in my eyes the same blood

that ran in the veins of that army of audacious women and men

who fought with rusty old machine guns,

knives and sickles, and their bare hands,

to eject a European nation,

which wielded the 4th largest military power in the world.

Murderous Regime! Murderous Regime!

A regime that makes a billion a day selling oil and gas

and yet lets the nation rot away like a sick dog.

Iracema,

there are times it looks like you and Majid came from the same place.

But I prefer to dream of a free Algeria,

with a free Brazil,

like you two did once.

"Glory to Him Creator of all things.

"And every thing its shape and its colour".

I felt like postponing my departure and taking another boat,

but I think it's time to leave.

So I go down to the harbour and stay there, staring at the sea,

awaiting the ship that will swoon me to the other side of the planet.

I imagine you, breaking out in laughter,

smoking a cigarette, wanting to engulf the world,

waving farewell to Algiers.

When I finally board,

I run to the stern and stare back at the city.

I try to understand if everything that happened here was real,

or if it was just another dream.

Algiers the Golden, the Red, the White, drifts away

becoming Algiers the Grey and the Sultry,

like a mirage.

I remember the word "calentura",

the term for heatstroke,

a condition that often afflicts mariners as they reach the Tropics,

a delirious fever that makes them imagine the sea

as rolling green fields,

and pushes them to want to jump overboard.

I look into the water and I want to throw myself into this silver blue

and ride a buffalo,

dive into the depths until I find your beloved red seaweed.

I want to fly, underwater, like in the myth Ines told me,

with no past, no resentment, faceless, tearless.

I want to fly all the way home,

wherever those may be.

To you,

my beloved Iracema,

with much saudade and joy,

your mariner of the mountains.

MARINER OF THE MOUNTAINS.

I want to specially thank all the Algerians

that have crossed my path

and who have accepted to accompany me on this voyage.