Algerian director Rachid Bouchareb’s new film ‘Little Senegal’ is currently being screened at the Algerian screening venues.
A brief review of Bouchareb’s works, which started in the eighties, accompanied the film’s screening. These included Red Stick and Life Dust which tackled the Vietnamese children issues and was nominated for the Oscar for best foreign film in 1998.
Bouchareb who has been residing in the US for many years has been hailed by critics and won many international awards. Little Senegal won the prize for best film at the African Film Festival while Bouchareb won the prize for best director at Valadolid Film Festival in addition to being nominated for the Golden Bear award at Berlin International Festival.
“In my previous films I depicted issues linked with my homeland by tackling the roots and the intersection of our culture with Europe. In Little Senegal, I wanted to offer the cinema a humanitarian dimension and concept in my capacity as an African. This is not the first time for me to address such humanitarian issues as I tackled them in Life Dust. I believe color does not matter as warmth and stances are the elements that push contemplation forward,” Bouchareb told the UAE daily al Bayan.
He added, “Little Senegal is not a film about roots and identity but it is an image that reflects the meeting between Africa and black America. I lived in America and interacted with its poor streets inhabited by Africans and I know much about these immigrants and their suffering. I wanted to summarize all this in Little Senegal and shed light on the tense relation between generations. As a director I travel very often and the humanitarian chronic issues attract me. I do not want to enclose myself as I like openness and going beyond the homeland boundaries.”
The Algerian director pointed out, “the main theme of the film is slavery. I talked with transparency about human groups, which were forced by the white man to emigrate from Africa to America, and tried to look for the cultural links between the black Americans and their past. I consider this topic a universal heritage.” -- Albawaba.com
