LOREDANA BIANCONI - LA VIE AUTREMENT

La Vie Autrement (2005, col., French spoken, 49’)

After Do You Remember Revolution, where she interviewed four Italian women with a revolutionary past (former members of the Red Brigades), with her latest documentary La Vie Autrement (2005, 49’) Loredana Bianconi presents four Belgian-Moroccan women who all lead a way of life that their families and surroundings judge equally revolutionary. Originally members of a culture that strongly condemns the public exposure of women and brought up within immigrant families that dreamt of careers as doctors or lawyers for them, these four women have chosen to follow an artistic path. A singer, a musician, a writer, an actress, they have all been confronted to the clash between their family’s traditional values and those of the country and society their families had chosen to live in. Or in other words, the clash between what was meant for them and what they truly desired. La Vie Autrement was shot in 2004, at the time of the 40th anniversary of Moroccan immigration in Belgium. It is no coincidence if the four women Bianconi interviews are all in their 40’s as well. These four women (Amina Bakkali, Farida Boujraf, Hayat N’Ciri and Madiha Figuigui) become therefore the representatives of an entire generation, the generation that Amina calls the generation of changes, the first to truly validate women’s qualities. Amina, Farida, Hayat and Madiha speak of the dreams their parents had for them, of their family’s reaction to their artistic ambitions, of the initial rejection, of the taboo it constitutes to be a Muslim female artist. It is precisely in their artistic expression that they have finally found a space of their own, an answer to their identity troubles, always caught between two worlds, two cultures, two languages. It is through their art that they have finally become free.