The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua

Assia Djebar is best known as a novelist whose work is grounded in the oral traditions of Algerian women. She describes her first film, “La Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua”, as born out of fieldwork: “The film was constructed from documentary sounds, that is to say, from conversations of peasant women recorded on tape. That’s the primary core of the film. Then I tried to visualize what they were telling me.” One of only two films Djebar completed (along with “Zerda or the Songs of Forgetting, 1982) “La Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua” adopts the structure of the musical from referenced in its title to tell the story of a woman returning to her birthplace fifteen years after the Algerian War of Independence.

(Erika Balsom)