28/04/2026 - The latest feature by Algerian director Hassen Ferhani is a profound and touching portrait of his father, but also of the city which he can’t help loving deeply, in spite of everything

Seven years after 143 Sahara Street, which earned him the Leopard for Best Emerging Director at the Locarno Film Festival, Hassen Ferhani has presented his latest feature film, Alea Jacarandas, in the Visions du Réel Festival, where it distinguished itself in the Burning Lights Competition (read our news). Alea Jacarandas is a powerful, mysterious and poignant film which not only explores legacy and intense family and artistic ties, but also how to carry on dreaming despite the atrocities of the past.

A courageous and lyrical portrait of a father-mentor who has always observed the world through the wonder-filled eyes of a child, Hassen Ferhani’s latest film is profoundly moving. A journalist, an intellectual, an essayist and a writer, the director’s father is a prominent figure on the intellectual scene in Algiers, a city he’s never wanted to leave and which feeds into each and every page of his books. But rather than offering up an elegy to his public persona, the director introduces us to his father’s inner world and to his connection with the city and the reality around him.

Based on a reflection on jacarandas - exotic trees hailing from Latin America which are now widespread throughout Algiers - Hassen Ferhani not only explores the city in which he was born and raised, but also the people’s struggle to accept the violence of the past which has left lasting scars on every street, every corner and every neighbourhood. A familiar and welcoming place, yet ransacked by bloody wars, Algiers becomes a metaphor for the contradictions characterising our society. The director’s father sees jacaranda trees - and Algiers itself - as allegories of freedom, fantasy and beauty, waking dreams which transform reality into a magnificent human adventure. “Dreaming is a form of resistance”, the protagonist reminds us, an act of great symbolic value which helps us to fight against the brutality of everyday life. In this respect, the capacity to feel wonder becomes fundamental to survive a reality which no longer has much to offer and which finds itself hiding in a corner like a wounded animal. Dreaming helps that animal to regain its strength and its beauty, and to return to living freely with its own kind.

By virtue of meticulous precision around the film’s score and sounds (of nature and the city), Alea Jacarandas is a markedly musical work, a hybrid composition, of sorts, dominated by the unmistakeable voice of the director’s father. Slow and hypnotic, reminiscent of slam poetry, the latter talks to us, through the pages of his books but also through spoken reflections, about his world, his city and his reality. His highly personal approach to observing details, people and, first and foremost, the fringes of society, washes over us like a dream from which we can’t - or maybe don’t want to – awaken.

From one jacaranda to another, from a page of his book to his theatrical interpretation, the film continually scrutinises reality. Composed of interviews, archive footage, and conversations with friends, relatives and strangers, Alea Jacarandas is a film which urges us to look at the world differently, with affection and fantasy, as if discovering it for the very first time.

Alea Jacarandas was produced by Les Films du Bilboquet (France) in co-production with Tact Production (France) and Guelta Production (Algeria). AndanaFilms handles international sales.

(Translated from Italian)