Honey Cigar

Kamir Aïnouz’s impassioned semi-autobiographical debut follows Selma, a headstrong French-Algerian teenager, trapped between countries and cultures. Seventeen-year-old Selma lives in Paris with her very traditional and patriarchal Algerian parents. As they start discussing her marriage prospects, Selma experiences a sexual awakening when she falls for her new classmate, Julien. As the family dynamic shifts and Islamist rebel groups start to take over her homeland, Selma begins to discover the power of her own desire and what it means to become a free woman.

‘I felt the need to write my own stories, nurtured by everything I had heard at home, particularly about colonization and the Revolution. For instance, in my family, we never spoke about “The Algerian War” but about “The Revolution”. There was a gap between what I heard at home and what I saw on television or in the movies. This diverging point of view is what gave me the urge to write my own stories. For Honey Cigar, it all began with an image I had in mind, of a girl laying on a bed…I thought to myself that she was so torn between her two cultures, Algerian and French, and that her body didn’t belong to her anymore.’

Kamir Aïnouz, Director