With seven features to his name, Franco-Algerian director Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche still remains relatively unknown to art-house moviegoers both at home and abroad.
And yet, ever since his 2001 debut, Wesh, Wesh, What’s Happening?, he’s been one of the most fascinating and consistently surprising auteurs to emerge from France these past two decades. Each new film, whether set in the present (Adhen) or past (The Smugglers’ Songs), the Paris banlieue (Wesh, Wesh) or an Algerian village (Bled Number One), adds something original to a body of work that is a perpetual experiment in narrative cinema, blurring the lines between fiction, documentary, reality, fantasy and history in ways few directors currently do.
His latest, The Temple Woods Gang (Le Gang des Bois du Temple), is ostensibly a crime thriller, with an English title that sounds like an old Western and a French title like that of an unreleased Wu-Tang Clan album.
And yet, ever since his 2001 debut, Wesh, Wesh, What’s Happening?, he’s been one of the most fascinating and consistently surprising auteurs to emerge from France these past two decades. Each new film, whether set in the present (Adhen) or past (The Smugglers’ Songs), the Paris banlieue (Wesh, Wesh) or an Algerian village (Bled Number One), adds something original to a body of work that is a perpetual experiment in narrative cinema, blurring the lines between fiction, documentary, reality, fantasy and history in ways few directors currently do.
His latest, The Temple Woods Gang (Le Gang des Bois du Temple), is ostensibly a crime thriller, with an English title that sounds like an old Western and a French title like that of an unreleased Wu-Tang Clan album.
- 2/15/2023
- by Jordan Mintzer
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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