The Blessed

The Blessed is a brilliant movie about conflicts between generations and how history and politics affect our most intimate relationships. We are in Algiers, and the year is 2008. It has been twenty years since the violent demonstrations that led to both a change of regime and a civil war. The members of the family we are introduced to seem trapped between the trauma of the past, the oppression of the present and a broken future. Why did choose to stay in Algeria, instead of leaving? There is little comfort to find in Algiers, neither for the free-spirited parents nor the cannabis-smoking son. Although the life of the tiny family of three seems bleak, director Sofia Djama's portrait is nevertheless intimate and warm, and the young actors perform beautifully. In sum, this film tells a gripping story about how it feels like to long for freedom, while dreading everything that tastes of the country’s colonial past.

Sofia Djama (b.1979) is an Algerian director. The Blessed was her feature film debut, which won three awards at the film festival in Venice last year. Djama has also directed several short films, among them Softly One Saturday Morning (Mollement, un samedi matin), which won two awards at Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival in 2012.