At 40 years old, in a road movie, I'm drawing a portrait of my father and his fifteen brothers and sisters and my grandfather's Tahar, an Algerian rifleman in Indochina—our self-portrait as Algerian immigrants.
A patriarch, Tahar: Indochina war, psychiatric hospitals. A grandmother, Taklit: marriage, exile to a slum in Parisian suburbs, support of the FLN. An illiterate mother, Zouina. A father working as a mechanic, Kamel, and his fifteen brothers and sisters are not only poor but also Arab. A failed return to the village back home, a liquidated business. Drug addictions, social climbing, forced marriages, escapes and divorces. I'm Soufiane, I'm forty, and after all that, I don't know what to do. To avoid settling for resilience, I'm taking the road.
