The first series showrunner to be featured in Screen International’s Arab Stars of Tomorrow, Algeria-born, Paris-based Zoulikha Tahar brings an iconoclastic vision to her work.
With her debut series El’Sardines, Tahar, along with co-writer Kaouther Adimi, won a special mention in the Short Forms Competition at this year’s Series Mania in Lille, France. The dystopian short-form series is about a girl who wishes to move from Algeria to Europe, and discovers all of the fish have vanished from the sea near her small town. It was produced by Fablabchannel, 2 Horloges and Arte France with backing from MENA sources including Doha Film Institute.
Unconventional is a word that seems to define everything about Tahar’s life and career. “I started writing poetry when I was 12, visual poetry that imagined landscapes and situations,” she says about the start of her journey to becoming a filmmaker. “That instinct to create images came long before I touched a camera.”
By 16, Tahar was performing in slam and spoken-word competitions, setting some of her texts to music and posting them online under a pseudonym, often accompanied by homemade videos. She later moved to Paris to study documentary filmmaking at La Fémis, and stayed to earn a master’s degree in social sciences at public research university EHESS — “partly to bridge my previous engineering studies in Algeria”.
“Being in France — the country that invented cinema — offered me a space at the heart of the industry,” she adds.
A Berlinale Talents alumni in 2023, Tahar is developing her debut feature documentary, which she will co-direct with William Laboury. “It will look at the way magic was subverted and used in the context of colonisation,” she says.
Tahar has started writing her first fiction feature with El’Sardines collaborator Adimi, about a group of teenage girls whose summer routine fractures “and they try to transform that rupture into a new form of freedom”.
Looking five years into the future, she hopes both projects will have been made and released. “And I’ll be writing my second feature, or even shooting it if I’m lucky.”
Contact: Léonard Stern, VMA
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