La Décennie noire

Algiers, 2005. The Algerian government commissions a director to create a work extolling the “Charter for Peace and Reconciliation,” the law intended to end the civil war by granting amnesty to armed Islamists who renounced violence. Yet, at a time when artists were still targets not only for Islamist terrorists but also for corrupt generals, the director and his troupe refuse to submit to this propaganda and decide to stage their own lives on set, revealing their truths about the 1990s—a period marked by terror, obscurantism, and dictatorship. The play is a mise en abîme that explores the relationships between Lyes, the director, his own life, and the life he is staging, as well as between the past and the present, theater and reality.