Rayhana fled her homeland in the late 90s when the Algerian black decade was at its gruesome heights. An actor and playwright, she had triggered a nasty witch-hunt that refused to die down even after years of exile. She realised the nightmare was not over when she stood at a Paris street in 2010, doused in gasoline, staring at the threatening spark of a cigarette lighter. But that hasn’t stopped her from making a film, a beautiful debut challenging ‘religious bullies’.
“Fortunately it was snowing and they couldn’t immolate me. Even today I get death threats and abuses on a regular basis, they hurl obscenities and expletives at me on every social networking forum,” says the Franco-Algerian director whose I Still Hide to Smoke will be screened in the international competition category.
Set in the 90s, I Still Hide to Smoke is woven around some women who try to soothe their physical and emotional bruises in the steamy sanctuary of a hammam (community bath). While they build an utterly feminine world within the four walls, their country is caught in a wild dance of massacres and violence, gore and suffering.
“The conflict is something I went through in real and I had to relive the pain and trauma to complete the screenplay. While they are part of a large external conflict, they also undergo some torment in their private lives,” she says. I Still Hide to Smoke is banned in Algeria and also in a string of Arab nations and Rayhana says no Algerian actress was ready to act in the film.
“I think in all religions the state of women is the same, the norms are set by patriarchy or its ghosts,” she adds.
The film does not have one single character at its centre, rather it is an ensemble cast that holds the plot together. “And all the characters in my film are real women. They are not symmetrical dolls but mothers and wives and virgins who are unapologetically themselves. They come with flab, pockmarks, wrinkles and all tell-tale signs of their age and despair. There are middle-aged women who are victims of domestic violence and there is this pregnant teenage girl who is fleeing from her enraged brother. The hammam becomes a kind of hideout for her, a place off limits to the menacing gaze of men,” she says.
Save for some random men on screen, I Still Hide to Smoke also boasts of an all-women cast and crew. Since they could not film in Algeria it was shot at a quaint hammam in Greece. A screen adaptation of her own play that infuriated a lot of religious fanatics and fundamentalists, Rayhana calls it a ‘100% feminist film’.
“If you smoke you become a slut by default. Smoking is unhealthy, but when it comes to women it’s more of a taboo or crime. They keep asking me why I am a feminist. I say it’s because I am humanist first, someone who believes equality can upgrade a lot of things including love,” she winds up.
