First, let me list a few facts about the film we are going to watch. D'ailleurs, Derrida had its premier showing in Spring 2000 on the Franco-German public television station, Arte, which co-produced it. It was written and directed by Safaa Fathy, an Egyptian filmmaker, playwright, and poet who has long lived in Paris where she also studied for her doctorate in English. It has since been screened many times at film festivals, in commercial theaters, and at numerous conferences such as this one, very often in the presence of the film's director and/or its subject, Jacques Derrida. The film was shot in 1999 at various locations, very few of which are identified in the film itself.

These settings are often used as evocative visual backdrops for the forgrounded figure of Derrida, who is heard and often shown speaking throughout the film's sixty-eight minutes. The only other figure who speaks on camera is Derrida's friend, the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. Occasionally one hears Fathy's faint voice off-camera posing a question, making a comment, or reading a passage, and once Marguerite Derrida is heard to speak, but otherwise it is Derrida's voice that fills the soundtrack, sharing it only with haunting airs of Arabo-Andalusian music or sounds of wind, birds, ocean, and sea.

The Mediterranean sea, along the coast of Algeria, at the port of Algiers, and on the southern coast of Spain, the Pacific ocean, seen from Laguna Beach in Southern California, are the most insistent visual presences alongside Derrida's.