RACHIDA

Opening images of RACHIDA, a woman putting on her lipstick, are deliberately provocative for regions of this world where civilization's clock has turned back and a barbarous patriarchy foments a climate of continuous fear, for both sexes. Such is Algeria in the 1990s, a North African nation ravaged by insurgent Islamic-militant terrorism. Rachida is a pretty young teacher in Algiers, shot by radicals when she refuses to carry a bomb to detonate at her school. The horror is compounded by the fact that she recognizes the boy gunman as one of her former students. Rachida heals in body but not in spirit; her defiant survival and that her mother, abandoned by Rachida's father, is divorced makes her a potential target for further violence in a city where police are impotent and virtually everybody knows of someone (even a family member) gone terrorist. Rachida's fianc? and a work colleague help both women relocate to a rural village for their safety. Despite the apparent tranquility, even here the children try to guess rifle types by the nightly gunfire they hear echo in the distance, and the religion of a marauding outlaw gang does not forbid rape, robbery or murder, not at all. As Rachida adapts to a slower pace of life and tremulously begins teaching again, evil is closing in. Only recently have Americans awakened to the reality of raw-nerve existence in a state of day-to-day alert. RACHIDA is a tensely eloquent portrayal of an agonized society under siege, where everyone lives a personal September 11. (In French and Arabic with English subtitles)