Epistolarity, Voice, and Reconciliation in Recent North African Documentaries

This essay takes as its starting point Laura Rascaroli’s notion of “epistolarity as argumentation” to probe how North African filmmakers Habiba Djahnine, Drifa Mezenner, and Jawad Rhalib deploy the letter in their documentary films as a strategy to come to terms with personal alienation at a specific point in their national histories. In Letter to my Sister (2006), I Lived in the Absence Twice (2011) and The Turtles’ Song: a Moroccan Revolution (2013), working within reflexive and performative modes of documentary, the filmmakers become protagonists of their own projects and find their personal voice after years of repression or exile. Thus, they ultimately connect their voice with others of the nation as strategy of reconciliation. The essay argues that these first-person documentaries use the epistolary device to allow the filmmakers to rediscover their own voices and place within their own national histories of Algeria and Morocco.