Papicha

When we meet fash­ion stu­dent Ned­j­ma, played by Lyna Khoudri, on a night out on the town with her mates, she seems like most free-spir­it­ed young women. Dressed to the nines, her eye­lids blue, and smok­ing a cig­a­rette out the cab win­dow (it is the 1990s), it looks like anoth­er clique movie cel­e­brat­ing female friend­ship and independence.

But as with oth­er recent films, such as Céline Sciamma’s Girl­hood and Sarah Gavron’s Rocks, things in Mou­nia Meddour’s debut fea­ture, Papicha, aren’t as joy­ous as they first seem. No mat­ter how many times the rug is pulled from beneath Nedjma’s feet, the misog­y­nis­tic vio­lence nev­er ceas­es to shock.

While Sci­amma faced crit­i­cism for attempt­ing to relate to the expe­ri­ence of young Black wom­an­hood in Paris, Meddour’s direc­tion feels unmis­tak­ably authen­tic. After being born and raised in Alge­ria, her fam­i­ly moved to France after her film­mak­er father received death threats dur­ing the Civ­il War. The oppres­sion of women shown in Papicha to be super­fi­cial­ly found­ed in reli­gion, espe­cial­ly through the insis­tence they replace their crop tops and miniskirts for hijabs, mir­ror the crit­i­cism she faced as a student.

In the film this takes on a broad­er sym­bol­ic pur­pose – it’s about cel­e­brat­ing women’s bod­ies rather than cov­er­ing them up, but at the same time pre­sent­ing the fright­en­ing­ly real­is­tic acts of ter­ror that sim­ple protest inspired. The uni­ver­si­ty cam­pus Ned­j­ma and her friends live on is a micro­cosm not only of Alge­ria, but of women fac­ing rad­i­cal repres­sion across the globe.

What Papicha so bril­liant­ly cap­tures is the insta­bil­i­ty of women’s expe­ri­ences. Rather than being relent­less­ly bru­tal, the film’s struc­ture bet­ter cap­tures the ups and downs of the char­ac­ters’ lives. There are peri­ods of fun that inter­cut the more chal­leng­ing moments, although the sit­u­a­tion becomes more chal­leng­ing as the film progresses.

Posters insist­ing women wear hijabs first appear out­side the cam­pus, then inside, then a patrol of veiled women breaks into Nedjma’s room, before the final bloody attack on her fash­ion show. She has to escape – of course she wants to enjoy her­self, but she’s incred­i­bly resilient, hav­ing worked hard to get to uni­ver­si­ty and then to design and organ­ise the cat­walk. She needs to find a place where her work is cel­e­brat­ed, not destroyed.

What’s impor­tant here is that we nev­er habit­u­ate to the gun­shots, to the deaths and vio­lence. It’s pre­vent­ed by those breath­ing spaces of music, laugh­ter, and cre­ativ­i­ty that bring us close to the char­ac­ters on screen. While the film ends with Ned­j­ma find­ing peace at her sister’s grave through her tears, we can’t let go once the cred­its roll. It’s not ulti­mate­ly about reli­gion after all – Med­dour shows us that vio­lence is ulte­ri­or to faith, since Ned­j­ma and her friends have the same fun­da­men­tal beliefs.

It’s the great­est asset of Papicha that it con­demns with­out being dog­mat­ic, show­ing its cen­tral con­flict to be more com­pli­cat­ed than West­ern audi­ences might oth­er­wise believe.