03/09/2025
Habiba Djahnine has built an extraordinary body of work at the intersection of cinema, poetry, feminism, and memory in Algeria.
Growing up in Béjaïa, she co-founded the Rencontres Cinématographiques de Béjaïa in 2003 and later established the Cinéma Mémoire collective to organize documentary workshops across Algeria. Her work has always been more than filmmaking: it is about reclaiming images, confronting trauma, and opening spaces where memory and debate can exist.
In this wide-ranging conversation with Giulia Crisci and Emmanuelle Bouhours, Djahnine reflects on a trajectory shaped by poetry, political engagement, and feminist practice. She recalls creating women’s film clubs in Béjaïa- where women had little access to cultural spaces- and organizing the 1994 festival Images and Imaginaries of Women in Algerian Cinema in Tizi-Ouzou with her sister Nabila Djahnine. These initiatives sought not only to bring women into cinema but also to cultivate spaces of discussion, disagreement, and collective learning.
“We have to create a balance between who we are and what we are filming. It is what I call the depth of the gaze, your positioning, where you stand.”
For Djahnine, this “depth of the gaze” is both a method and a politics: a way of practicing cinema that is inseparable from her lifelong feminism. “The only station I have never left is that of feminism,” she explains, a commitment that informs every film, workshop, and text she produces.
Her 2006 film Lettre à ma sœur marked the beginning of her filmmaking journey, followed by a dozen works that deal with memory, violence, and social transformation. With Cinéma Mémoire, she experiments with participative production models where resources and tools circulate among participants from across Algeria- Oran, Kabylia, Constantine, Sétif, creating networks of solidarity and mutual support.
This is what makes Djahnine’s work urgent: it is not only about representing women on screen, but about transforming the very conditions of cultural production. Her feminist cinema refuses alienation, reappropriates self-image, and insists on cinema as a practice of freedom.
Read the full interview with Habiba Djahnine, conducted by Giulia Crisci and Emmanuelle Bouhours, on UntoldMag.
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