Hold Back preceded by After the Sun

Director: Rachid Djaïdani, Rayane Mcirdi

2024 / 110min / DCP

After the Sun (2024, 25 mins)

Hold Back (2012, 85 mins)

Novelist, actor, playwright, and ex-boxer Djaïdani’s deftly handled debut fiction feature is an audaciously original take on shopworn star-crossed lovers material: Sabrina (Sabrina Hamida), a French Arab Muslim woman, plans to marry Dorcy (Stéphane Soo Mongo), a Black Christian, but when word of the arrangement gets to her disapproving brother, Slimane (Slimane Dazi), he sets out to criss-cross Paris and consult the other brothers of the family—all 39 of them!—concerning the problem of this impending interfaith marriage. A frequently hilarious, breezy and streetwise film fable, screening with Mcridi’s late ’80s-set After the Sun, which premiered in Director’s Fortnight at this year's Cannes Film Festival, and follows a French Algerian family’s odyssey from the Parisian suburbs to the port of Marseille, the younger members preparing to visit an Algerian “homeland” wholly unknown to them. Selected by Alice Diop as part of her carte blanche, furthering her creative dream of an “ideal cinematheque of the outskirts of the world”

Introduction by director Alice Diop on Saturday, November 16th