Afterwards

Awarded at Corto di Donne (Naples) and Zagreb (Women film festival).
RCB Bejaïa – AFLAM (Marseille) – Setif – Kaliber35 (Munich) – Ljubljana (Migrant films)

A few days before her death, a very old woman tries to remember her past.

Alzheimer allows her to reinvent swathes of her existence, the most painful – 12 abortions, the coldness of a distant husband – a disease, but a sieve that offers her a possibility to support the weight of existence.

She remembers the Foxtrot and her Jewishness but forgets her own name, or rather her two names: Sylvia Lignon & Messaouada Haki.

Thus, this investigation on identity, articulates intimate memory and collective history,or rather, memory lapses and official historiography.

In the omissions of the character-witness, the truth of emotion beyond the banality of lost anecdotes emerges, the glassy facade of official archives summons up something out of the field of view, something more complex that only time can exhume.

Afterwards, is a film about an ordinary being who traversed the turmoil of the twentieth

century with three wars as milestones of time: the WW1 & 2 and the Algerian war.

This woman, my maternal grandmother, was very talkative before falling ill, I know what she has forgotten, or rather I, sitting and listening out of frame, know what she has told me, that I now retell her.

Afterwards, evokes with simplicity a timeless and universal question: What is a human life?

• Image : Valérie Osouf
• Sound : Emérance Dubas
• Editing : Valérie Pico
• Production : Christine Chansou et Vincent Trintignant-Corneau