Biography

I was born in Algiers in 1971. I started writing at the age of 17. First as a columnist. “ Octobre, ils parlent ”, my first book, was published in 1998. It's an essay on the tragedy of the October 1988 riots. Hundreds of deaths, thousands of arrests and just as many cases of torture. Since then, I've published other books: Dans le refuge des balles perdues (published by La découverte), Mes nuits dans mon rétroviseur (collection of short stories, published by Barzakh), La nuit tous les morts sont gris (published by SAEC), etc. I'm also a photographer and filmmaker, and my films include Sortie d'usine (2005), Babylon Constantina (2015), Terminus 60 (2024), L'étrange monsieur Daoud, in post-production, scheduled for release in 2025.

Project

A sexless man, emasculated during a long torture session, wanders the nights of Algiers as a stowaway driver.

He's fleeing the world of daytime, losing his identity and looking for a new one in the world of night. In his wandering, he meets a woman who is looking for a brother who disappeared during the civil war. All she has left of this missing brother is a piece of identification, her own, which she preciously hides in her handbag, sometimes considering it to be a reincarnation of the missing body. She wants to give her brother a dignified burial. But without a body, she can't have a grave in a cemetery.

So how do you bury a piece of identification in place of a body? How do you give a grave to a brother who has only his ID left?

A cross between a man without a gender, looking for an identity, and a woman with an ID, looking for a body - the body of a missing brother she wants to bury to mourn him.