In the late 1960s, in a poor suburb north of Paris, Abdelrahman Sedira was in the habit of taking his little girl Zineb to the local cinema on his day off. Abdelrahman Sedira worked as a cleaner in a factory. He was illiterate in both French and his native Arabic having hardly been to school, but he and Zineb shared a love of film. The cinema was the place where Abdelrahman met other working men, some like him from Algeria, some also with their children in tow. Father and daughter’s favourite films were spaghetti westerns, or schlocky Egyptian epics about Cleopatra. In place of subtitles an Arab speaker might stand at the front and shout out ad hoc translations. Those afternoon adventures stayed with Zineb Sedira, opened up worlds for her.
Fast forward to 2022, and that same little girl, now a resident of Brixton in south London, is selected to represent France at the famous Venice art biennale. There are some protests at her appearance from conservative voices in Paris – what does this daughter of Algerian immigrants, an exile in London, know of French culture? But Sedira doesn’t listen to any of that. As part of her pavilion, she recreates the rough old cinema in Gennevilliers in which she and her father had spent those 1960s afternoons. And she doesn’t stop there. She locates films of Algerian émigrés like her father arriving in France in hopeful berets and somehow inserts herself in among them. She brings to life a famous celluloid bar-room in exacting detail – in order to recast a celebrated, taboo-breaking scene from the movie Le Bal in which a Parisian woman dances the tango with an Algerian man (Sedira sashays as the woman). And she remakes in loving homage the living room in Brixton, with its retro 1960s furniture, its vinyl records, its film posters, in which these vivid memories had settled in her head.
