Too rare Yemeni film, The Lights of Aden has been able to reach the French theatres at the beginning of the year. His physical output is the ideal opportunity to come back to this poignant feature film, shot as much as the chronicle of a country in perpetual crisis as it is the exploration of the intimateness of a broken couple. A resolutely significant film, of which we are fortunate that it reaches us.
From theater to screen...
Israel (Abeer Mohammed) shares her life with her husband Ahmed (Khaled Hamdan) and their four children, not far from the port of Aden in southern Yemen. The crisis affecting their country, from public schools to higher state institutions, does not save them and a sudden increase in rent pushes them to move to a decati apartment. And as if that wasn't enough, Israel learns that she is pregnant. A new mouth to feed is just unthinkable for this couple who fail to pay the exorbitant tuition fees of their last-born: the only solution therefore seems to lie in abortion...
Amr Gamal began with theatre, despite the massive closures of these places of culture at the end of the 1994 civil war and Islamist pressure. However, he gradually evolved in the field, and from representation to representation, he managed to aggregate around him a true troupe of artisans of culture. Attracting in his wake a population deprived of cultural representations, he quickly met success in Aden, which he managed to emulate with the release of his first film, 10 Days Before the wedding. Made with the means of the edge, the feature film is projected throughout the city until reaching more than 70,000 entrances! An ideal springboard for The Lights of Aden, the proportions of which are all other : the film is selected in particular at the Berlinale where it goes back with several prizes, then is distributed internationally.
From "damaged" to glimmer of hope...
Translated literally from its original title in Arabic, the international title The Burdened (Les Accablés) surprisingly converse with his French title, The Lights of Aden. Two almost perfectly antithetical proposals, which nevertheless each have their relevance even if the choice made by the French translation has this interesting that it indicates a hint of hope and promises a feature film that will never be lead. And that is definitely the case! Everything seems to go from bad to worse for this married couple in these noisy streets, where the social body exudes with a palpable anger, where the radio erupts an ever more closed future and where family worries still lead to the whole. And yet!
Whether it's the beauty of the landscapes of Aden, the cooking sun that seems to repaint with pastel all that it touches or the joy emanating from this small family nucleus, the "light" of hope of the title seems constantly present. If abortion is a double pain – a hindrance to the religion of this believing couple but also a shame to be riddled under the eyes of others who are implored to carry out a surgical gesture reprimanded by morality and forbidden by law – it itself appears as a possible escape, a promise of a lighter future.
The discreet charm of the long plane
To build his feature film, between-drawing the contours of this couple in crisis within an equally troubled country, Amr Gamal chooses the long plan. Talks, power cuts, re-ignition, car trips, passage to the water point and up to the apartment, the director embarks us in their daily lives and embraces in an alternation of very broad (and still) or very tight, almost claustrophobic plans, constantly several levels of reading.
When in the foreground the distress of a mother whom one understands unbearable without this ever being highlighted, the joy of children walking at his feet locks even more in his intimate, unspeakable drama, a thebade of sadness that morals and religion make even more inexpressible. In the background, the local radio newspaper furnishes the silence suddenly granted by the kids, adding a third layer of information (this time societal) to a plan already full of meaning but never becoming indigestible.
Anyway, you'll understand, The Lights of Aden is a particularly interesting film, and this is all the more so as it happens to us from a country whose cinema rarely makes a way home. An hour and a half jewel built as much as an argument for women's rights as an exciting scan of Yemeni society today. And the opportunity to recall, in these times troubled by the rise a extreme right so quick with racist, misogynist or LGBT honour armsthat the primary right to abortion has been difficult to acquire and is increasingly threatened by retrograde conservative and reactionary forces...
And to return to the many themes of this history that makes history, an interview with filmmaker Amr Gamal (28 min) is to be found in the bonus section.
Data sheet
DVD Zone B (France)
Publisher: Blaq Out
Duration: 87 min
Release Date: June 18, 2024
Video format : 576p/25 - 2.35
Soundtrack : Arab Dolby Digital 5.1 (and 2.0)
Subtitles French
[...] Our body that documents from inside the turpitudes of the female body or the most recent The Lures of Aden narrate the fictional story of a woman trying to get an abortion in Yemen [...]