October 5th, 1988. The youthful revolt fires the popular Bal El Oued neighborhood, in Algiers. A revolt which ends up extending across Algeria. Firing into the crowd, causing dozen of deaths, the government had just, unintentionally, opened a passage to the Islamists. The neighborhood’s mosques became the cradle of religious fundamentalism leading to a ten-year bloody war.


  Nowadays, peace returned in the poorest part of Algiers. But, the wounds of the « black decade » are still very vivid. The Bab El Oued infrastructures are rusting out, unemployment reaches peak levels, radicalism imprisons the social ways and new drugs continuously appear. Enough to forget its popular and mediterranean characters, the values of friendship and solidarity that is supposed to ease the mood.
«Handiwork» and small-scale traffickers are everywhere. Boredom is palpable and that, from the elderly people whose values belong to a different time to the youth, prisonners of this history and a future that, for them, does not exist. They all try to go on moved both by anger and renunciation.


  Bab El Oued suffocates again, left behind by the government of a rich country and seems to crystallise the depression which plunges the Algerian People into suffering.


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