Lledo's Algerias, my phantoms

Jean-Pierre Lledo sent me all of his films on DVD in 2007 after a Pied-Noir writer, Marie-Claude San Juan put us in contact. I had been trying to get a copy of Algéries, mes fantômes (2003) for years but couldn't get it shipped to the States. I finally (shamefully only) finished watching it today.

Yvette Teurlait remembering the massacre of 17 October 1961

Lledo's search for his own ghosts of Algeria in France began in 1998 on March 19 at the commemoration of the end of the Algerian war. His film ends with images just after France won the World Cup in 1998. His camera lingers on two celebrating fans waving flags, one Algerian, one French. The flags intertwine and overlap. Lledo expresses in the final scenes:

"Seul un jeune de cette génération peut faire ce geste-là. Un geste qui allait rester dans la gorge de tous les nationalistes et tous les intégristes. Qu’ils étouffent ! Mes fantômes pouvaient retourner dans leur patrie. Et moi, quand retournerais-je dans la mienne ? A moins que la mienne ne soit la patrie des gens de passage."

"Only a youth of this generation could make that gesture. A gesture that would remain caught in the throats of all the nationalists and all the fundamentalists. Let them choke! My ghosts could return to their homeland. And me? When would I return to mine? Unless mine is a homeland of transients."* 

Lledo's search for his country, Algeria, where he remained until 1993, is complex and moving. His opening scene at the Port of Marseille with his daughter Naouel explaining nostalgia as a "manque" 'lack' frames Lledo's movement as he travels all around France to talk about his films on Algeria. His encounters with multiple memories of Algeria -- from soldiers who admit to having tortured during the war, to Pieds-Noirs and Algerians who suffer from their exile, to the child of Harkis who struggles to understand her father's shame -- do not evoke nostalgic reunions. They demonstrate what Fiona Barclay's Writing Postcolonial France: haunting, literature and the Maghreb (Lexington Books, 2011) affirms, "France is haunted" (xi). Algeria and the Algerian war have long haunted France and the array of those who have been touched by the two countries still struggles to put that ghost to rest, whether by returning or simply remembering the influence one has on the other.

* My translation differs from the English subtitles on the DVD.