IN THE LAND OF WONDERS

Et les dimanches ? (And on Sundays?)
Nora Seni, France, 1976, 26 min, Original with English subtitles

Ali au pays des merveilles (Ali in Wonderland)
Djouhra Abouda and Alain Bonnamy,France, 1976, 59 min, Original with English subtitles

Restored in 2021 by Image Retrouvée. 

At the end of the 1970s, two young women experimented with political cinema and filmed their community - Nora Seni in Grenoble, and Djouhra Abouda (together with Alain Bonnamy) in the Paris region. Et les Dimanches traces the Sunday of a Turkish worker in a French provincial town; loneliness and wandering its strangely empty street become a threat to their mental health, despite the fact that their weekday existence resembles that of a French worker. Ali in Wonderland, a film in which “every image was filmed to hit you like a fist,” (Djouhra Abouda), is an experimental, political and radical film about the experience of immigrant Algerian workers in France in the mid-1970s.

Nora Seni is a historian and political scientist. She teaches at Paris 8 and was director of the IFEA (French Institute for Anatolian Studies in Istanbul). Her research focuses in particular on Ottoman history in the 19th century and on gender. She is also the author of historical works and directed two documentaries: Et les Dimanches? (on Turkish emigration to France) and Si je t'oublie Istanbul (on the Jewish community in Turkey). At the end of the 1970s, she actively participated in discussions on the political potential of cinema and its forms, notably during the Rencontres du Cinéma Militant in Rennes, where she was invited.