Certainly this film opened my eyes to just how horrendously violent the seemingly endless low- level civil war in Algeria in the 1990s was.
Rachida is a young, free-spirited teacher just trying to live her life when terrorists shoot her after she refuses to carry a bomb into her school for them. She survives, but has to flee Algiers to hide in a small town in the countryside. She is traumatized and afraid, but slowly tries to re- build her life, at the same time violence continues to take an ever deeper hold even in her new small town.
But while the subject is important and the intentions are admirable, the film is hampered by weak acting that tends to both the stiff and the overwrought, characters who can lapse into cliché, along with a sub-plots that feels awkward in its attempts at comic relief.
I wish the quality of story-telling could have lived up to the value of the issues being raised, but I'm still glad I saw it.
Rachida is a young, free-spirited teacher just trying to live her life when terrorists shoot her after she refuses to carry a bomb into her school for them. She survives, but has to flee Algiers to hide in a small town in the countryside. She is traumatized and afraid, but slowly tries to re- build her life, at the same time violence continues to take an ever deeper hold even in her new small town.
But while the subject is important and the intentions are admirable, the film is hampered by weak acting that tends to both the stiff and the overwrought, characters who can lapse into cliché, along with a sub-plots that feels awkward in its attempts at comic relief.
I wish the quality of story-telling could have lived up to the value of the issues being raised, but I'm still glad I saw it.