Gender, Violence and Representation in three Algerian Women's Films

This article focuses on a feminist aesthetic of violence that distinguishes Algerian women filmmakers' treatment of violence from that of earlier male filmmakers. Such feminist aesthetics reveal how questions of gender and nation have moved to the forefront of analyses of the roots and repercussions of institutionalised violence. Through their female protagonists, Yamina Bachir's Rachida (2002), Djamila Sahraoui's Barakat (2006) and Yema (2013) represent traumatic events and their effects on women during the civil war that engulfed Algeria during the 1990s.