This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the FEPACI and UNESCO – in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna – to help locate, restore and disseminate African cinema.
When she decided to express herself behind the camera, Assia Djebar had not written a novel in ten years… I met Assia Djebar at the cinémathèque in Algiers, where she was a regular presence. She had confessed to me her particular admiration for two filmmaker-auteurs: Ingmar Bergman and Pier Paolo Pasolini. In 1976, after knocking on several doors that remained closed, Assia Djebar arrived at the RTA (Algerian Radio-Television) to propose a scenario that she wanted to film herself. I was the director of the production department at the time.
In La Nouba, the female eye creates a cinematographic space, bringing the monocular vision of the camera lens closer to the single-eyed gaze behind the Haik, the traditional veil worn by our mothers. Many believe that La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (along with Nahla) is the most compelling film of cinematographic ideas that Algerian cinema has ever produced. The director explores the women and their war for independence through a subtle blend of archival documents and audiovisual recreations of women’s oral stories. With its five movements, the work is constructed like a Nouba, a reference to the elaborate structure of the Arab-Andalusian musical genre. Intrigued by Béla Bartók’s research on popular Algerian music in 1913, Assia Djebar would have liked to have made a second feature, but explained, “I very quickly ran into difficulties. Generally speaking, La Nouba was poorly received. The press ridiculed my ‘feminist’ images, which ran counter to the socialist realism favoured at the time.” Shortly afterwards, I showed the film to Carlo Lizzani, the newly appointed director of the Venice Film Festival, who selected it for the official competition. We attended the festival together in early September 1979. In front of an enthralled Italian audience, the film won the FIPRESCI prize, the only one given that year by the journalists. The day following the screening, Assia Djebar wrote me: “I must admit that this distinction, which I had not expected, warmed my heart. Especially after this long year of Algerian ‘protests’ over the film, it seems like a vindication of Carthage. We certainly deserved it.”

Ahmed Bejaoui