ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the complex interaction between local politics and conditions of international funding may have influenced the representations of women’s agency and activism in Rachida (Bachir-Chouikh 2002). The film engages with the trauma and experiences of Algerian people, particularly women, during the 1990s postcolonial Algerian war. Rachida was made within the context of a France/Algeria co-production, which meant that, in its representations of the Algerian war experience, the film’s producers had to contend with local politics and the conditions of obtaining international funding. This chapter argues that Rachida enters into a discourse with the bodies of Algerian women in ways that reveal an awareness of the ideological struggles between the Arab and Euro-American worlds involving conceptualisations of women’s agency and activism. Although the film uses stereotypes familiar to the Euro-American audience – the veiled woman as a symbol of oppression and the unveiled woman as a symbol of liberation – the film settles into a narrative that offers a complex and contextualised feminist perspective that highlights Algerian women’s agency in dealing with and resisting terror.
