The Mime Zouzou
by Lina Soualem

My father is part of the first generation of immigrant children born on French soil. During his whole childhood, his immigrant parents always told him they’d return to Algeria as soon as it became independent. Yet they never went back and never explained to him why.
My father inherited this silence; is this why he became a mime?
I inherited this silence as well; is this why I started making films?
I can hear my voice insisting: I come from a generation that grew up in the deafening silence of the Algerian War of Independence, a generation born to grandparents who seemed to have ‘no story’, to grandparents who were terribly silent, incapable of telling and transmitting a paradoxical itinerary. Born colonised in ‘French Algeria’, foreigners on their own soil, they were obliged to move to France to work. The immigration of Algerians in France was lived as a supposed temporary exile. After having fought for the independence of Algeria for decades, and after working tirelessly in France in the hope of one day returning home, they finally settled in a country that had colonised them and denied them the right to be independent. The eventual return was postponed indefinitely for unconfessed reasons (economical and political). This generation of immigrants built a life based on the mystification of a never-realised return and silence.
In my first film, Their Algeria, I ask my grandparents to break this silence in order to understand my family’s story, to give them back their place in History and to enable all of us to reclaim our memory. But they give me only glimpses. As I try to awaken the buried memory of their longstanding exile, I discover the persistent suffering of their uprooting. An uprooting they can’t put into words, one they never overcame.
I was raised in Paris, born to an Algerian father and a Palestinian mother born in Galilee. When I was a kid, my mother made sure to take me to her native Palestinian village every summer to visit our family. During those trips, my father always had a camcorder and filmed compulsively as he was discovering the land, its people, and his new family.
In the images he filmed in the ‘90s, we travel through a millennia-old territory: Nazareth, Golan Heights, Akka, Jericho, Jerusalem, and Gaza. Some of these territories have been transformed or made inaccessible, and some have been completely destroyed or partially erased.
I grew up with these ghosts of images.

Coming across these VHS tapes from the ‘90s was like meeting a character. They opened the door to a forgotten world of everyday life, places, and beings. These scattered, disorganised images that my father filmed were lying there for decades, without spectators, patient. Until I found them.
I scrutinised them, wanting to decipher them. They were the memory of a lost time, of people long gone, of lost happiness, telling our intimate and collective stories, tracing the dark periods that were behind us—or not quite yet.
For a long time, I didn’t know what to do with them, apart from looking at them obsessively.
Just as with silence, archives only have meaning if they have a witness.
As the heir of silence, I became their witness.
These personal archives became the starting point for my documentaries: Their Algeria and Bye Bye Tiberias, my second film, which narrates the lives of four generations of Palestinian women in my maternal family and explores their shared legacy of separation.
Through my films, I’ve sought to extract the soul of these archival images, to resurrect them.
However, there’s a character that I somehow left behind in both films: the man behind the camera. My father. The Mime Zouzou. A young Algerian immigrant. The one who filmed and asked to be filmed. An Algerian in Palestine who sought to capture and leave a trace.
As I look at the footage, among the images of a dislocated Palestine made of bucolic landscapes, arid panoramas, groups of soldiers, barbed wire, beautiful green hills, olive trees, checkpoints, a wall, closed borders, street weddings, and family celebrations, I suddenly see a young man appear, facing the camera.

It’s Zouzou coming in and out of the frame, staging himself—sometimes disguised as a woman or a clown, miming those around him, trying to make people laugh. Conscious of the camera pointed at him. Acting a role: the role of a strange, young man, an intruder coming from elsewhere who seeks a place for himself and a way to be accepted by those around him through laughter.
Although I know my father’s background story, I can’t help but see this young version of him as a fictional character. Who is this man? How can he bring the burlesque to a territory marked by war, destruction, loss, and tragedy? How does he allow himself to be light?
In the middle of the crowd, he carries exile like a burden. A spatial and temporal exile. Far from his land and disconnected from the world he’s discovering, we see him performing. We are submerged in his silence. We feel his loneliness. But he makes us laugh.
I can’t find the words to describe him. What is he?
Is he a light, joyful being, navigating through territories as a chameleon?
Is he a dysfunctional body, carrying a heavy trauma, calling out for help?
Some say an exiled person lives suspended in time and always remains affected by having been uprooted. Exile as a sense of loss seems almost palpable.
I look for traces of this exile in Zinedine’s silent gestures.

Through his character, he creates an imaginary territory, beyond physical borders.
He blends distant worlds. An Algerian mime in Palestine. An ex-colonised body performing in an occupied territory. An exiled being travelling around. He’s countering the drift of internal exile, as an Algerian immigrant in France, who neither grew up nor lived in Algeria.
As I look closer at the way the young Zouzou moves around the territory and among the people in the images, I witness how a body struggles to exist in a context that doesn’t seem to allow laughter.
Laughter becomes his resistance strategy.
A personal strategy for existence.
Joy comes as a counterpoint.
Finally, he is a political character who allows us to reflect on the ways we resist uprooting and exile.
Although his gaze is one of a stranger, an intruder, what he captured through filming and bringing to life his burlesque being becomes essential in a context in which we lack historical footage as Palestinians. His images give visibility to intimate memories that echo the collective memory of people dispossessed of their rights and constantly bound to reinvent themselves in exile. Each image becomes proof of a denied existence. Algerians. Palestinians. Uprooted. Exiled. Resisting. Existing. A people in need of leaving a trace. People fighting against vanishing into oblivion.