Farouk Beloufa: Nahla

Nahla
Farouk Beloufa, 1979
116 min, 35mm
Arabic and French with English subtitles
Archival print courtesy Academy Film Archive

On the Set of Nahla
Jocelyne Saab, 1979
27 min, 16mm-to-digital video
Arabic and French with English subtitles
Courtesy of Association Jocelyne Saab

Farouk Beloufa directed one feature film, Nahla, in the late 1970s, a handful of years before his son Neïl was born. The film holds a powerful place in the history of Algerian cinema, even as 35mm prints of it become increasingly rare, and it left its mark on the younger Beloufa as he began developing his own distinct body of work as an artist and filmmaker decades later. On the occasion of Neïl Beloufa’s exhibition at the Renaissance Society, we’re pleased to screen Farouk Beloufa’s film, as well as Jocelyne Saab’s short film On the Set of Nahla, a behind-the-scenes documentary, also from 1979, that engages the cast and crew of Nahla in conversations about the film.

Shot in 1978 but set three years earlier in 1975, Nahla follows the intertwined stories of four characters in Beirut at the onset of the Lebanese Civil War. Nahla, a young singer who loses her voice; Maha, a feminist journalist; Hind, a Palestinian activist who provides a channel to the camps and later joins the resistance; and Larbi, an Algerian journalist caught in the tumult. An elliptically structured political drama, Nahla’s narrative linearity is propelled only by real-life political events: the battle of Kfar Chouba, a meeting between Kissinger and Sadat, the assassinations of Maarouf Saad and Saudi King Faisal, and so on. Co-written with Rachid Boudjedra and produced by Radio Télévision Algérienne, Nahla is the product of a distinct 1970s pan-Arab leftist intellectualism which connected Algeria, Lebanon, Palestine, and beyond.

Special thanks to Bidoun, Tiffany Malakooti, and the Film Studies Center at the University of Chicago.