Screening of the film Ali in Wonderland by Djouhra Abouda and Alain Bonnamy (France, 1976, 16mm, 59 min)
« Each image was filmed as though it were a punch in the gut » in this experimental, political, and radical film about the condition of working women and men who immigrated to France in the mid-1970s. Ali in Wonderland by Abouda and Bonnamy is an outcry against exploitation and racism, openly targeting the role of the French state, the media, capitalism, and colonisation in the system of domination that unrelentingly crushes those who live under it. Shot on 16mm, the film combines formal power and inventive aesthetics with a thematics of militancy. “I turned my lens to the daily movements emigrant workers” explains Djouhra Abouda. Far from a contemplation or representation of suffering, this attempt at a different kind of cinema allows for the emergence of aesthetic and political violence, both denunciatory and liberatory.
Digitised and restored in 2021 at the Image Retrouvée laboratory (Paris). Project lead by Talitha in collaboration with Djouhra Abouda and Alain Bonnamy.
BIOGRAPHY OF DJOURHA ABOUDA
Djourha Abouda, using the name Djurjura, launched her musical career in the 1970s, mixing women’s words and demands from Kabylian culture. Her cinematic interventions begin with “Algeria Colours” (1970–1972) and “Cinecity” (1973–1974), kaleidoscopic collages produced with Alain Bonnamy in the experimental laboratory of the Université de Vincennes. Ali in Wonderland, shot on 19mm, released in 1975, is a more direct gesture, radical and searing, militant and musical.
BIOGRAPHY OF LÉA MORIN
Léa Morin is a curator and independent researcher, co-founder and director of the Observatoire (Art et Recherche) in Casablanca/Morocco. A graduate of the FEMIS (École Nationale Supeerieure des Métiers de l’Image et du Son, Paris/France), she was formerly the scheduler and director of the Cinémathèque de Tanger. Her practice consists in designing and producing situations and contexts for participatory research, in the form of workshops, seminars, exhibitions, screenings, publications, film restorations, and pedagogical programmes. Her research primarily concerns archives, examining cinematic history and heritage in an attempt at retracing the historiographies of that which is absent, disappeared, and forgotten.
