"The Golden Olive" reflects the suffering of Amazigh cinema in Algeria
Members of the jury before announcing the names of the winning films of the Golden Zitouna Award for Amazigh Film
In the large screening hall of the Mouloud Mammeri House of Culture in the Algerian province of Tizi Ouzou, “Da Ahsan” - as young people like to call him - sits in the audience, anticipating and awaiting the announcement of the list of films crowned with the Golden Zitouna Award for the best Amazigh cinematic works.
While he was sitting and shaking one hand to the rhythm of the Chaoui Amazigh song and its fast rhythms by the “Ithrane” group, which opened the closing evening of the Amazigh Film Cultural Festival in its session this year, he returned to his memories of years past, to the beginning of the eighties in which he took his first steps in the world of cinema, when He and a group of young amateurs such as Tahar Yami announced the birth of Amazigh cinema in Algeria .
“Da Hassan” or Ahsan Osmani is considered one of the creators who have a prominent presence in the Algerian cinema scene in general, and the Amazigh film scene in particular. Over the course of an experience spanning thirty-five years, he produced and directed about 27 films.
Ahsan Osmani: Amazigh cinema cannot transcend its environment without support
In 1999, he won an award from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization ( UNESCO ) at a film festival in Montreal, Canada, where more than 167 directors competed against him, for a film chronicling the Algerian liberation revolution.
Despite this busy journey, Osmani assured Al Jazeera Net that "it was not a bed of roses, but it was fraught with challenges and difficulties."
Amazigh cinema, he explains, “like any other cinema in all countries of the world, cannot transcend the boundaries of its environment and reach professionalism and internationalism without having the necessary means for that. The director or producer cannot offer anything in the absence of that.”
Challenge and frustration
, and if the capabilities, according to his words, “are available to professionals to a certain extent, then for the new generation they constitute a challenge and a source of frustration.” He remembers well how he struggled and suffered a lot in his early beginnings in 1982 with the scarcity of capabilities, and how he worked hard to overcome that by relying on producing films. A documentary with its own capabilities, despite their few and limited ones.
Director Omar Belkacemi (right) receives the Golden Zitouna Award for Best Short Film
Despite its emergence in the 1980s, Amazigh cinema did not know the production of professional works except with directors Sherif Aqoun with his film “The End of the Jinn” in August 1990, and Abdel Rahman Bouqarmouh with his film “The Forgotten Knoll,” which addresses the issue of convictions related to identity in its Amazigh dimension.
Now that it is approaching its fifth decade, Amazigh cinema is still a hostage of its geographical environment, a lack of training and the absence of specialized film institutes.
These shortcomings cast a shadow over the Amazigh Film Festival when the jury announced the withholding of the Golden Zitouna Award for the feature film category due to the lack of participating films that lived up to the required level.
The sixteenth edition of this festival, which concluded its activities yesterday, Wednesday, witnessed the participation of 17 cinematic films in the three categories, long, short and documentary, out of 47 films submitted for competition.
The Golden Zitouna Award was awarded in the short film category to the film “The Wave” by director Omar Belkacemi, while the Golden Zitouna Award was awarded to the best documentary film by director Oussama Ray for his film “Azmoulane Nelgarara”, which highlights the diverse identity and culture of the Al-Qarara region in the Gutter Valley in the Ghardaia Governorate in southern Algeria.
Hostage of Geography
The Best Actor Award went to Waamer, and the Best Actress Award went to Joukhija Makhmouch for their role in the movie “Amenadiel,” which embodies a love story lived by the Amazigh artist Ali Farhati, while the Jury Prize “Thakoumt Networth” went back to director Omar Amroun in the short films category.
"Ithran" Shawi song troupe during the closing ceremony of the Amazigh Film Cultural Festival
During his speech at the opening ceremony of the festival, the Minister of Culture, Azzedine Mihoubi, criticized the confinement of Amazigh cinema to its geographical space in the Kabylie region , and called for the necessity of moving it out of this region towards the rest of Algeria in the service of Amazigh culture and identity, declaring his intention to support Amazigh cultural and cinematic production.
Mihoubi’s observation that Osmani refused to link it to the problem of the Amazigh language and its lack of understanding in some Algerian regions, and attributed the reason to the lack of capabilities and means, as producing cinematic works that are able to transcend their geographical borders requires larger budgets.
If, in his opinion, the language problem can be overcome by dubbing, then this process also “requires additional amounts of money that producers or directors cannot afford,” as he put it.
While Mihoubi's announcement described support for Amazigh cinematic production as a "motivating matter," he believes it is necessary to direct a large portion of this support to train and qualify all those working in the film industry, including actors, directors, technicians, screenwriters, and others.
In what sounds like blame and reproach, Osmani asked the new generation to consult those who came before them in this field, and not to rush to reap the fruits by burning the stages, as it is not possible to “become a film director after having a year or less of acting experience.”
He considered that "paying attention to the artistic, narrative and aesthetic aspects of the produced works is necessary to create a serious cinematic work that will be a gateway to professionalism and expansion beyond the boundaries of the environment and geography."
Source : websites