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Ask Your Shadow with Director Lamine Ammar-Khodja

Ask Your Shadow Still

France, Algeria • 83 min • Arabic, French with English Subtitles • Documentary • Digital Presentation • NR
Directed by: Lamine Ammar-Khodja
Original Title: Demande à ton ombre

Special screening Nov. 7 at 4:30pm followed by a Q&A with Director Lamine Ammar-Khodja

Showtime:
Wed, Nov 7 at 4:30pm (Followed by a Q&A.)
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Film discussion with director Lamine Ammar-Khodja and professor Patricia Lorcin, Department of History, University of Minnesota.

Eight years after leaving native Algeria for France, Lamine Ammar-Khodja decides to end his exile on January 6, 2011, the day major riots break out in Algiers. Organised chronologically, the film is a first-person narrative and, just like Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, to which the director pays tribute, it deals with the difficulties of getting back home. Because this journey isn’t only a private matter, but also an opportunity to go back over Algeria’s recent history, at a time when it could have taken another major turn. The subject is addressed in the tone of comedy, using humour and irony, instead of expected despair. Cheerfully mixing styles, playing freely and gracefully with the cinema medium, and claiming rebellious youth in the name of all the young outcasts, this first film surely reveals an original artistic stance and writing: a new director is born. (by Jean-Pierre Rehm)

Director Biography: Lamine Ammar-Khodja was born in Algeria in 1983, and grew up in the suburb of Bab Ezzouar. He later moved to France in 2003. His previous short films include: Algiers Less Than Zero, '56 South, How to Reframe an Outlaw by Pulling at a Thread. His first feature documentary film Ask Your Shadow was selected in FID Marseille 2012 and received the First Film Prize.

Sponsored by: Institute for Global Studies, Department of French and Italian, European Studies Consortium, Mediterranean Initiative, and The Film Society of Minneapolis St. Paul