Nahla (1979)

After the battle of Kfar Chouba in Lebanon in January 1975, Larbi Nasri, a young Algerian journalist, was caught in the whirlwind of events preceding the civil war. Linked to Maha, Hind, Raouf and Michel who surround Nahla, he witnesses the construction of the myth of Nahla, a singer adored by the Arab population. One day Nahla loses her voice on stage. The atmosphere of crisis that reigns around her is spreading like an infection. Larbi, fascinated, loses his footing and gets bogged down. Nahla by Farouk Beloufa occupies a special place in Algerian cinematography. It is to this day the only film shot in the Arab world by an Algerian filmmaker at a time when Lebanon was engulfed in a political-civil and sectarian war which lasted fifteen years from 1975 to 1990. Between a wonderfully "fictionalized" Beirut reality and a semi-novelistic approach to what remains an identity conflict, Farouk Beloufa wrote Nahla just after the famous battle of Kfar Chouba, in January 1975, a border village in southern Lebanon. Influenced by the filmmaker Youssef Chahine, whose assistant he was on The Return of the Prodigal Son, Farouk Beloufa signed, with Nahla, one of the notable works of Arab cinema in terms of the skill he used to draw a picture of three women, who make this film one of the most beautiful regarding the universe of these Arab passionarias who campaign or are active in favor of the emancipation of the female gender.