Programs Calendar Films

In 1974, under the “Family Reunion” law, the French government decided to allow the families of Algerian men working in France to legally emigrate to join them. Inch’Allah Dimanche tells the story of one such family. After a tearful good-bye to her friends and family in Algeria, Zouina (Fejria Deliba) arrives in France with her three children and moves into a house that her husband has rented for them, filled with the hopes and promises of a new life. However, Zouina’s husband Ahmed fears that his wife’s honor may be threatened in this foreign society and subsequently forbids her to leave the house. Throughout the film, Zouina is physically abused by her husband and emotionally attacked by her caustically “evil” mother-in-law. Zouina’s neighbor, Madame Donze (France Darry), is a xenophobic busybody so obsessed with winning the prize for the best flower garden that she cannot empathize with Zouina and is cruel to her. Meanwhile, a young woman who works in a makeup factory, Nicole (Mathilde Seigner), helps Zouina feel accepted, and sparks her interest in French culture and the new world around her.  As the days pass, Zouina finds herself struggling between traditional Algerian values and the rapid feminization and modernization of France. Constantly subject to the tyrannical wrath of her domineering mother-in-law and miles away from her friends and family, Zouina finds her only source of relief is Sunday – the one day that Ahmed and his mother are out of the house – when she takes her children on excursions through the countryside and attempts to come to terms with the difficulties of immigration, integration, and an ostensibly impossible sense of independence. 

Born in Lille, France on April 9, 1957 to Algerian parents, film director Yamina Benguigui is renowned for her penetrating cinematic treatises on gender issues related to the North African immigrant community in France, particularly the Maghreb.  Benguigui began her career as assistant to Jean-Daniel Pollet for four years before beginning to write and direct her own films including the documentaries Women of Islam in 1994 and Immigrant Memories—The North African Inheritance in 1997. It was The Immigrant Memories- the North African Inheritance that marked her success in the film industry. This stunning reflection on the memory and the exile of North African immigrants was welcomed favorably by critics and the general public. Since then, Benguigui has realized a series of short films and documentaries including The Perfumed Garden (2000), Pimprenelle (2000) and Pas d’histoire! A Look at Everyday Racism (2000). In 2001, she made her first feature-length fiction film Inch’Allah Dimanche. Despite her success, it took Benguigui awhile to be accepted both by her family and the general public as a prominent Algerian female filmmaker. According to her, “It was extremely difficult for me. One price I had to pay was that I had to be willing to cut myself off from my father. My father was not willing for me to follow this career, and it’s only recently that I’ve been able to reestablish contact with him […] Because you’re cut off to some extent from French society, you have to really impose yourself, you have to really fight to be able to work on subjects like this, subjects and realities that France isn’t necessarily willing to acknowledge. It’s a constant struggle, and you’re constantly juggling several different hats: the hat of a woman, a director, the daughter of immigration. It’s not easy.”