Following two award-winning documentaries Their Algeria and Bye Bye Tiberias, Lina Soualem is attending Atlas Workshops with her first fiction project, Alicante.
“Where do we come from? What is family? What are we?” These are the key questions the French-born filmmaker says have echoed throughout her two previous award winning films and is what she wants to keep exploring in Alicante.
The project, in early development, follows Assia, a 30-year-old Franco Algerian photographer who travels to Alicante to meet up with her parents, who have invested in a restaurant in the Spanish seaside resort, only to have to navigate the rescue of a fragile business and delicate family dynamics. “The Algerian family feels right at home in the familiar topography of the region,” says Soualem, “but Assia has no idea what she’s in for.”
Produced by Omar El Kadi and Nadia Turnkey of France’s Easy Riders Films, Alicante, is particiapting in Atlas Workshops in search of co-producers, funding partners, sales agents and distributors. The project has a proposed budget of just over €2 million and will shoot in both Spain and Paris.
Soaulem was born in France and is the daughter of Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass and French-Algerian star Zinedine Soualem. She says her background directly informs her filmmaking. “As a descendant of immigrants, I try to undertake the urgent yet daunting task of addressing the questions of colonial trauma, exile and transmission through creative writing and building imaginary territories.
“The film sheds light on the intricate interactions among people who love each other and are seeking their places, in their family, in modernity, in the world,” she adds.
Soualem would like Alicante to help to reframe the Algerian experience. “Filming an Algerian family in Spain is a way to shift the representations of Algerians and Franco-Algerians, who are often locked into a stigmatised prison or seen through an opposition between France and Algeria,” she explains. “Representations of Algerians, North Africans and Arabs are often over-politicised and/or instrumentalised by the powers or counter-powers in place.
“It’s a strategy of resistance to tell the stories of non-majority voices. If we don’t tell our own story, we disappear, and the public representation is constructed without us.”
At the same time, Soualem, who is also a TV writer and has acted in a few films, is quick to emphasise a deep seam of humour will run through the Alicante. “It will oscillate between family drama and dramatic comedy.
”Because, often, it is humour that will save us.”
This year marks the second time Soualem has participated in Atlas Workshops, having been through Marrakech’s industry sidebar two year ago, pitching Bye Bye Tiberias, then in post-production. The film in which Soualem documents her mother’s return home to Palestine from many years in France went on to premiere at the Venice film festial and enjoy a healthy festival run, winning best documentary at the BFI London Film Festival and the jury prize in Marrakech in 2023.
“The Atlas Workships are a great place to share our projects, meet partners, programmers and funders from the international cinema industry in a well-curated programme in which filmmakers are heard and valued,” says Soualem. “Marrakech is a great place to see films, and keep on re-discovering Arab and African cinema.”
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