Shown in Venice’s International Film Critics’ Week, Algerian director Yanis Koussim’s Roqia [+lire aussi :
critique
interview : Yanis Koussim
fiche film] moves in between timelines and genres – from the Algerian Civil War in the 1990s, when his protagonist Ahmed is struggling with amnesia, to the present-day struggles of an ageing exorcist. In this universe, evil is always close.

Cineuropa: You play with horror tropes quite a bit in Roqia: it’s drenched in terror. Is it something you also enjoy as a viewer? 
Yanis Koussim: I’m a big fan of horror movies. I grew up in the 1980s: it was the golden age of these movies. Poltergeist, A Nightmare on Elm Street… When I decided to write about the 1990s, which was a bloody decade in Algeria, after reading the first draft, I realised I was working on a horror movie. This genre imposed itself on me, in a way. It was a revelation. 

You’ve lived through these events, too. Why did you want to go back to all that trauma?
As a filmmaker, I write about my wounds. We all knew these terrorists. Every Algerian had one terrorist in the neighbourhood, at school, in the family. It was a man or a woman – because there were women, too – and they would disappear one day and become real monsters. I was wondering: how do people like you and me suddenly start committing horrible crimes?

I was a teenager at that time – this question has been following me all my life. I don’t think I answer everything with Roqia, but at least I’ve answered it for myself. I resolved it. I just hope that all the Algerians, and all the people who face absolute evil, can eventually find peace.

Yours is a very claustrophobic story. You like to be with these people in dark rooms: it feels like there’s no air and no escape.
So many parts of this film were completely instinctive. When it comes to the claustrophobic aspect… I figured it out during the editing. I thought: “There are a lot of interiors!” I think I was doing it in some subconscious way because this kind of trauma is intimate. It’s kept inside. You know, when you walk the streets in Algeria, you can’t see how traumatised we really are. We hide this secret within our walls. 

What happened in Algeria in the 1990s was really the first time: it felt like our country was a laboratory of terrorism. Before that, we didn’t know this kind of fear. The world eventually found out about [terrorist group] Daesh, about Al-Qaeda, but it came much later. At the beginning, Raqi – the exorcist – and Ahmed were actually the same character. It changed after I worked with a great script editor, Ruth Atkinson, trying to figure out how to address all of the aspects of our Algerian tragedy. You can’t talk about the past without actually showing that past. We needed to know about it. Later, I added Alzheimer’s disease and amnesia because when you try to erase a memory, evil comes back. I read about terrorists, and that’s what happens to them: they completely forget who they were. They forget their family, their studies – they forget everything. Just imagine – you have a neighbour you’ve known since childhood. You played football with him. Then he’s gone, and someone tells you he’s been killing people – in a horrible manner. You don’t know this person any more! That’s why Ahmed is covered up in all these bandages at the beginning. He’s faceless. It could happen to anyone. 

It really could. Things like these make your story much more universal than one expects. Was that your goal, somehow?
When you discover that perhaps you’ve succeeded in making something universal, it’s a gift. Then again, I talk about good and evil. It’s not related to just one religion or just one nation. It concerns all of humanity. There’s the evil we called Nazism, the evil we called colonialism, the evil we called slavery. There’s the evil that’s happening in Gaza right now. Throughout our entire history, we’ve always had to face it. 

There’s this actress, Adila Bendimerad: she makes a cameo in the film. We are writing her next movie right now because she also directs, and it happens during the French conquest of Algeria. She told me that if we look at all the massacres that happened in the 1990s and compare them with the massacres during colonisation, there’s a big overlap. Most of them happened in the exact same spots. Evil likes to return to the same place.