Where are you, Tariq Teguia? is part of the series of short films commissioned by the Centre Pompidou, which asks invited filmmakers to create a free-form film to answer this question about the future, its desires, its projects! Where are you now, Tariq Teguia? is less a self-portrait - from Thessaloniki to Algiers, Lisbon or Beirut - than an attempt to escape it.
Ibn Battuta works as a journalist for an Algerian daily newspaper. While covering community clashes in Southern Algeria, he finds himself incidentally picking up the trail of long forgotten uprisings against the Abbasid Caliphate, back in 8th-9th century Iraq. For the purpose of his investigation he goes to Beirut, a city that used to embody the hopes and struggles of the Arab World...
"For more than ten years, Algeria has been living a slow war, a war without a front line but having caused more than 100,000 deaths. It is this desert that Zina and Kamel – two young Algerians sometimes hallucinated and joyful, sometimes dejected and serene – will want to travel one last time before leaving it for elsewhere. Road Movie on the territories of a city, Algiers whose construction sites are in decline. Roma wa la n'touma will show that fleeing abroad is not is not a refusal of combat, but an obscure struggle against assignment. Tariq Teguia
