French Algerian filmmaker Mia Bendrimia takes an emotional journey into both a family’s and a country’s past in her documentary feature debut “Magma,” which is participating in the Docs in Progress strand of the Thessaloniki Documentary Festival’s industry section, Agora.
The film, which is produced by Bendrimia, Oscar nominee Kira Simon-Kennedy (“Ascension”) and Imane Lamime for Nazar Films and 19 Mulholland Drive, follows the director on a quest to understand her family’s Algerian roots, a troubled history long buried by silence around a bitter chapter in France’s colonial past. In the search to understand how colonization tore her family apart, she travels to Algeria for the very first time, where she discovers how the painful memories of the past continue to find echoes in the present.
Set against the backdrop of Algeria’s war for independence, “Magma” is nevertheless an intimate story about a family grappling with the “intergenerational trauma” of its complicated connection to the North African country, according to Bendrimia.
Speaking to Variety in Thessaloniki, the director explains that Algeria was a “taboo” subject in her household as a child. “We were very disconnected,” she says, noting that her father, who was born in France, never visited the country or learned to speak Arabic. “Gradually, when I started to ask questions, I realized that this silence was rooted in fear because of my grandfather’s past.”
During the independence war, Bendrimia’s grandfather was a harki, one of the native Algerian Muslims who served as auxiliaries alongside the French Army. After Algeria won independence in 1962, the harkis were considered traitors in their homeland; thousands were killed in reprisals for their loyalty to the former colonial power. In France, meanwhile, the harkis were refused sanctuary — President Charles de Gaulle dismissed them as “soldiers of fortune” — and many were subsequently interned in detention camps.
This bitter history was neither acknowledged in Bendrimia’s schools nor at home. Her grandmother, who she says served as the “primary keeper” of memory for the family, was always evasive about those “painful and difficult years.” “Even though the war ended more than 50 years ago, the wounds are still fresh,” Bendrimia says. “It took years for my family to finally agree to talk to me about what happened.” Only through “a lot of patience, a lot of care, a lot of trust and a lot of years,” she adds, could “Magma” finally begin to take shape.
The director uncovered several surprising facts during her research, such as the role played by her grandfather’s cousin — a freedom fighter lionized by his countrymen as the “Algerian Rambo” — in the independence struggle. The discovery, she said, was “one of the times where reality outstripped fiction,” and one of the many instances where the truth of her family’s history seemed to thwart her efforts at a straightforward retelling.
“The story was much more complicated than I thought,” she says. “I encountered a lot of contradictions, a lot of different versions of the story. It was much more challenging to unravel than what I anticipated. It was very confusing and frustrating, but at the same time it was beautiful.”
As its title suggests, “Magma” hints at what the filmmaker describes as “the volatile nature of suppressed memories” — both on a personal level and as a national project — memories that in turn threaten to “erupt and flow into the present.”
“What happened in my family really reflects the dynamics that we see in France with this willful amnesia, or this erasure of the past,” she says. “This film is not only a personal catharsis; it also, hopefully, will be a manual or a tool kit for other people inspired to embark on similar journeys. Because by delving into those taboo subjects within my own family, the goal is to demonstrate that such conversations are not only possible but essential.”
Producer Simon-Kennedy, who earned an Academy Award nomination in the best documentary category for Jessica Kingdon’s “Ascension” in 2021, insists that now is “the right time to be having these conversations” in France. “It’s only in the last two or three years that people are starting to get a handle on this,” she says. “We’re really hoping this is something that can open the conversation, because France is quite head in the sand about its colonial past.”
The country is slowly beginning to reckon with what Bendrimia describes as “the darker chapters of its history.” New fields of academic study and popular enquiry have emerged around the subject of decolonization, and in 2012, former President Nicolas Sarkozy recognized France’s “historical responsibility” in abandoning the harkis who fought alongside their former colonizers.
Bendrimia sees such cautious strides as emblematic of the “urgency to acknowledge the past” that inspired her film. “I really hope to encourage a broader dialogue and motivate those who see their own story reflected in our story to undertake their own explorations, and maybe initiate their own healing processes,” she says.
The Thessaloniki Intl. Documentary Festival runs March 6 – 16.
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