LA PROMESSE

Artist and filmmaker Rayane Mcirdi presents his new film La Promesse at Le Sémaphore, an iconic independent film theater in the city center of Nîmes. Time capsule and road movie combining fiction and documentary, it reinterprets an annual summer trip to Algeria in the late 1980s, as told to the artist by the women in his family and imagined from photographs he has found. Taking place mainly in his grandfather’s car, this enclosed setting immerses us in the intimacy of a family, on the roads between the Paris region and the port of Marseille. It is an opportunity to tackle questions of intergenerational and family transmission, roots, the return to the country of origin, memory and identity, while considering the importance and difficulty of remembering. Rayane Mcirdi was mentored by director Virgil Vernier throughout the production of his project. A publication accompanies the film, created with women from the Pissevin neighborhood in Nîmes, members of the association Les 1000 Couleurs, to compile other stories and testimonies from such a journey.