From Oran to Almería
2023 · 6m · France
Directed by Lina Saïdani
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Aghilas, a young Algerian, is consumed by a life that offers him nothing in his native country.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The title promises migration and displacement, but Saïdani's animation style sidesteps the expected political sermon—there's something almost perverse about how formally gentle it all is, which makes the melancholy land harder than any didactic statement ever could.
A formally precise study in animated restraint; Saïdani positions this work within a lineage of essay-films that use rotoscopy and hand-drawn geometry to meditate on movement and loss, with the rigor of someone who understands cinema's conversation with painting.
The choice to animate rather than document feels almost counterintuitive until you realize the abstraction is doing the work—each drawn frame becomes a deliberate act of witnessing, transforming what could be reportage into something intimate and unrepeatable.