Houria in competition at the Angoulême Francophone Film Festival

Heroic resilience

Houria, 25 years, a young dancer, is part of the youth who is thirsty for life and fights for her dreams every day. A cleaning lady by day, she takes part in clandestine bets around ram fights by night. One night, after winning the final of one of these fights, Houria is brutalized by a pardoned former terrorist. When she wakes up in the hospital, nothing is the same. Now unable to dance or speak, her life is shattered. Her disability isolates her from the world and her dream of joining the Algerian National Ballet goes up in smoke. But Houria refuses to give up. In the rehabilitation center, Houria learns to accept her new body and to love it. She ends up developing a dance project with a community of women damaged by life's accidents and finds a meaning to her life in the repair and sublimation of injured bodies.

  • Together, they will rebuild themselves through dance.
  • Together, they will communicate in another language.
  • Together, they will dance to find their freedom.

Mounia Meddour, the director of the film Houria, has imagined her main character as a grandiose, tireless heroine, in the image of this Algeria, bruised and tormented but still standing. Although weakened by her handicap, she does not give up. Her relentlessness in the dance becomes a kind of resistance. After being deprived of her voice, Houria becomes the symbol of all those who have been silenced but who remained standing.

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