Silence dans le fortin
Éléonore Weber
2002 - 45 min - Couleur - France

A group of Algerians congregate in the Sahara, in the south of the country, for a few weeks. They live in Algiers. Most of them are under twenty-five. They have come to Timimoun as non-professional actors, with a few exceptions, to perform in a fiction shot by Merzak Allouache, which intertwines a love story and political violence in Algeria.
Constantly back and forth between fiction and reality, they utter very intimate and contradictory words, often taking them nowhere. Transferred to the desert, their double questioning about terrorism and the relationships between men and women assume a special dimension.
Mingling fictional elements and interviews shot in destitute places (a dilapidated high-class hotel, a ruined fort), this documentary aims at highlighting unusual utterances.