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Film Of The Week Fashion victims

MARIA DUARTE recommends a hard-hitting film on the prejudice women in Algeria face over what they wear

Papicha
Directed by Mounia Meddour

WHAT we wear can have a powerful impact — think Alexander McQueen’s striking and controversial fashion shows and women hurling their bras into a rubbish bin in protest at the Miss America beauty pageant in Atlantic City in 1968.

Papicha, set in late 1990s Algiers, embroiders that theme in exploring how garments such as the haik — a full-body covering — is used to subjugate and control women.

Fashion becomes a means of resistance in this insight  into the radical events of the Algerian civil war.

The drama follows headstrong and budding fashion designer Nedjama (a stunning Lyna Khoudri) and her best friend Wassila (YouTuber Shirine Boutella) who by day are university students while by night they are out clubbing and selling Nedjama’s creations to girls in nightclub toilets.

Dressed to the nines, they let their hair down as they smoke, dance and sing along the latest pop hits.

Based on writer-director Mounia Meddour’s own university experiences in Algeria — but not the shocking finale — she skilfully and powerfully juxtaposes Nedjama’s university life and fun-packed nightlife with the fundamentalists’ violent exploits and growing campaign to curb women’s freedoms by forcing them to cover up their bodies in the name of religion.

Some scenes, with a gang of women dressed in black haiks forcing their way into lectures, abducting a professor and then bursting into Nedjama’s dorm room and threatening her and her student friends over their liberal behaviour, are hard to watch. University girls are labelled sluts.

It is after a shocking personal loss that Nedjama decides to take a defiant stand by staging a fashion show with her university friends, including Kahina (real-life doctor of biology Zahra Doumandji), who is desperate to leave the country and the deeply religious Samira (Amina Hilda Douaouda) who is nevertheless supportive of Nedjama’s plan. This leads to the jaw-dropping final act.

With powerhouse performances by Khoudri and the supporting cast, it’s impossible not to incensed by the characters’ heinous experiences and Papicha is a reminder of how women have a voice and an equal right to be heard, taken seriously and allowed to follow their dreams.

A must-see.

In cinemas and on digital release.

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