Yema by Djamila Sahraoui (review)

There are populations—the Kanaks, for example—who say that identity is the land you cultivate. In Yema (the term for “mother”), it is nature in its entirety that determines the present and the future. A woman, Ouardia—admirably played by the filmmaker herself—loses her favorite son, Tarek, whom she lovingly buries. He was an officer in the valley. Her other son, Ali, is fighting with the rebels in the mountains. Ouardia is in between, on the hillside, cloistered, and watched over by a one-armed man whom Ali designates to “protect” her. She is the interface between these two worlds. We will never leave this house and surrounding fields. It is here that Algeria’s tragedy is played out, in this in-between zone, a woman confronted with men’s madness.

Ouardia doesn’t hate Ali but rather the deathly ideology of which he is in the clutches and that snatched away her cherished son. To those who sow hate and death, she opposes the seeds she obstinately sows in her garden, the life that her jailor initially refuses to grant her, until he in turn becomes a son figure, espousing this logic of life. In one magnificent shot worthy of Chahine, their hands knead the at-last-irrigated land together. Ouardia does not forgive, even for Eid; she simply chooses not to give in. It takes time for the logic of life to take hold, the rhythm of the seasons, the simple gestures of laboring the land. The film thus remains in step with nature, caressing its beauty, following its rhythm. No need for music: just listening to the wind, which grows wild at times, when hatred returns. The unchanging rituals of nature and the laboring of the land answer the forty-day mourning ritual. This determination to revive life means that when her grandson arrives the grandmother knows to take care of him. Only this female consciousness can break the vicious circle of a constantly renewed violence.

From this classic story of a mother and her opposing sons, Djamila Sahraoui creates an incredibly sensitive and minimal film whose images delve deep into us and won’t let us go. Her simplicity of style does not lessen the incredible tension of the film, there from start to finish. She sparingly offers up details little by little, to such a degree that the viewer has to piece them together and choose the extent of the metaphor. Amid nature’s luminous splendor and the chiaroscuro interiors of the farm is played out the resistance of a country that, in its current state of in-betweenness, needs to rediscover the femininity and logics of life that will guarantee its future.