In the Middle of the Sahara Desert, meet Malika, Guardian of the Void
“143 Sahara Street” by Hassen Ferhani: 8/10
On the edge of the Trans-Saharan national road, a café-restaurant stands like a fortress. This is the "kingdom of Malika" as Maya, a Polish biker crossing Algeria, proclaims it. Inside, the modest kingdom consists of a table and a few chairs offering convenient protection against the harshness of the desert. Sitting with her cats, Malika waits patiently to see her clients appear from a horizon blurred by wind and sand. A few kilometers from the city of El Menia (Algeria), the exiguous business is a shelter where a majority of men, truckers or travelers, can drink a coffee, buy chewing tobacco or eat an omelet. Surrounded by stones, its four walls collect the stories of these men of passage who disappear back into the Algerian desert. Here, they find an attentive ear in the person of Malika, a woman who inhabits the images of Hassen Ferhani.
143 Sahara Street is a declaration of love and cinema to this woman who shines through the enigma of her existence in the middle of the void. "I have been given a place in this world, of course, I am here" she retorts to those who ask too many questions. Since 1994, Malika's extraordinary determination has allowed this oasis of sociability to survive and to cross Algerian history, even the Black Decade (1991-2002) lived under the tacit protection of Le Borgne who spoke of her as a "saint". In this man's world, she is distinguished by her independence towards all forms of domination, patriarchal and/or capitalist. If she "hates" women, she despises, even more, those who despise and coerce them. Her existence in itself is a strong political gesture. Unquestionable sovereign of the desert, Malika fills her kingdom with her exuberance and her bursts of voice. She fights relentlessly, but not without fear, against the globalization that is emerging from the frame of her door, embodied by the intrusion of building engines announcing the construction of a gas station.
While the economic competition intrudes in the edges of the desert, Malika shows that she is the center of this universe of sand. From her chair, she gives an identity and a story to all these anonymous automobiles that tirelessly travel the Algerian roads. At her place, Algeria invites itself: musicians, imams, truck drivers, or simply men in search of hope. 143 Sahara Street becomes then the effervescent heart of an Algeria of the forgotten ones, who water with their stories and their memories the Grand Erg occidental. Since the brief appearance of President Boumédiène in the late 1970s during the inauguration of the road, the political world has completely abandoned this territory. The collective history that is written in 143 Sahara Street is one of the generalized precariousness of this entire rural Algerian class. Faced with rising fuel prices and the rarity of work, they appeal to providence to improve the situation or at least to prevent it from deteriorating further.
After the pains and dreams of the men working in the slaughterhouses of Algiers in Roundabout in My Head (2015), Hassen Ferhani finds a place that crystallizes the popular resistance of a two-tier Algeria. 143 Sahara Street interweaves, even provokes, the bonds of a community struggling against the ravages of globalization. Like Malika, the community exists politically by the only fact of being there.
