Alea Jacarandas

From Viennale

It takes the camera a moment to find them, but afterwards it picks them out everywhere: the jacaranda trees of Algiers, their leaves injecting the grey streets with bursts of bright purple. The director’s father once made an inventory of them in preparation for a novel, but stopped counting by the time he reached 200. Now his son follows him around the city with his camera in search of specimens once again, which is actually a sly excuse to narrate the ambivalences of the Algerian capital, as the respected author and his filmmaker son create an essay together that’s never afraid to wander off the beaten track or into the self-reflexive. They visit the iconic Mausoleum of Sidi Abderrahmane and Café Malakoff, but also chat together in the car and at home or engage a homeless man and some booksellers on the street in conversation, even as conversations with a literary agent, a discussion with students about the writing process and the son’s early filmmaking attempts on pixellated video equally come to the fore. But just as history, dendrology, literature and cinema are gleefully intertwining, life intrudes and a new film must emerge, which comes to epitomise one of the rules of documentary cinema bandied about earlier. You must love the people you’re filming. (James Lattimer)