WORKINPROGRESS
Sarah Derris Senior
A LOOK AT STUDENT PROJECTS AS THEY DEVELOP
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RITUAL: Stills from Derris’s film
80 www.dukemagazine.duke.edu
any of my films grapple with identity—being Algerian, American, Muslim, notso-Muslim. I have had to reconcile Algeria’s colonial past and to understand that what it means to be Algerian is inextricably intertwined with French colonial history—within our language, cuisine, architecture—woven into the very material of our national identity. My project “False Chronology” explores the lingering French colonial consciousness in Algeria: the customs, ways of life, and landmarks that will outlast firsthand memory of French colonial rule. It also follows my grandmother, whose memory continues to fade by the day. My parents both belong to indigenous Berber groups, and I have had a longlasting fascination with Berber facial tattoos and the many Berber traditions that are fading from practice and memory. The last generation of Berber women with facial tattoos was born in the 1930s and 1940s, and the number of those women left is rapidly declining. Similarly, the Algiers my parents and grandparents knew is fading: The Catholic school my father attended, a remnant of French colonial rule, has been converted into a mosque. My grandfather’s neighborhood, The Casbah, once a central hub and trading center dating back to the Byzantine empire, has been slowly crumbling since the French-Algerian war due to a lack of infrastructural funding. These fading landmarks and traditions in post-colonial Algeria and my grandmother’s fading memory will be the focal point of this experimental documentary project and my memory-preservation efforts. n
