L’autre monde

Allouache did not visit his home country of Algeria ever since 1993, when he shot his film Bab elOued City there. When the situation in the country seemed to calm in 1999, he went there and came back with the idea for L’autre monde, a story about Algeria and about the dead who are now apparently being forgotten. A love story with a sharp look at reality, and a tribute to the women of Algeria.Yasmine, a Française of Algerian parentage, works in Paris in a lawyer’s office and is about to marry her boyfriend Rachid, a successful computer programmer. Then, without any reason, Rachid suddenly disappears. Yasmine gets one more message from him, in which he tells her that he has left for Algeria and has joined the army there.Yasmine decides to go looking for Rachid in Algeria, a country she barely knows, whose language she doesn’t speak, and which is torn apart by civil war. There is not much to be seen of this in the capital, but when Yasmine travels to the countryside, to the barracks where Rachid is stationed, she finds herself in a different world. From an officer, she hears that Rachid is missing after a terrorist attack and that he is probably dead. Yet she carries on looking, deeper and deeper into dangerous territory.