Assia Djebar (1936–2015) is one of the most famous Algerian women authors in history. In this chapter I focus on the only two films she ever made, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, one of which is hardly ever mentioned while the other is revered as a feminist masterpiece of psychoanalytic treatment of historic trauma. Djebar was born Fatima-Zohra Imalayen on 4 August 1936 in Cherchell, a small Berber city in Chenoua, the mountainous region on the northern coast of Algeria, just west of Algiers. As her father was a teacher of French language his children were sent to the French-language school, and Djebar regrets not speaking Berber. Her studies continued in Paris, at the Lycée Fenelon, and she became the first Maghrebi woman to be accepted to the École Normale Supérieure. As a student in Paris in the 1950s, she joined the protests against the occupation of Algeria and for Algerian independence. Her political activism went further, when, during the War for Independence, Djebar collaborated with the Front Libération Nationale (FLN) newspaper El-Moujahid (The Militant). Personal experiences as a woman involved in the Algerian War for Independence have heavily influenced the subject matter of her stories, novels and papers, as well as of her two films, La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (1978) and La Zerda, ou les chants de l'oubli (1982).

Djebar wrote her first novel when she was twenty years old. La Soif (The Mischief) was published in 1957. She anticipated the controversy that later surrounded the novel and published under the pen name Assia Djebar. With this nom de plume she continued to confront the controversial topic of the relationship between France and its ex-colony, even though it was still taboo in French political and cultural life until well into the 1980s. The disappointment of independence, the role of Muslim women in society, migration and the longing for home are consistent themes in her novels. In 1974, she returned to Algiers to teach French literature and cinema for the French department at the University of Algiers.