The jacaranda trees that once lined the boulevards of Algiers are mostly gone now, casualties of urban development and official indifference. But in the memory of one elderly Algerian man, they still bloom purple every spring, transforming the city into something almost dreamlike.

This is the terrain that filmmaker Hassen Ferhani maps in "Alea Jacarandas," a documentary that premiered last week in the Burning Lights competition at Visions du Réel, Switzerland's premier documentary film festival. The film is simultaneously intimate and expansive — a portrait of Ferhani's own father that becomes a meditation on how Algeria's capital city has been reshaped by decades of political turbulence, rapid construction, and selective amnesia.

Ferhani, whose previous work has explored marginal spaces and overlooked lives across Algeria, turns his observational lens homeward this time. But the personal subject matter doesn't narrow the film's scope. Instead, the father-son relationship becomes a prism through which to examine larger questions about memory, architecture, and what happens when a city tries to erase its own past.

A City in Constant Erasure

Algiers is a palimpsest, a city written and rewritten over centuries of Ottoman rule, French colonization, independence struggle, and postcolonial nation-building. Ferhani's camera captures this layering — Ottoman-era Casbah neighborhoods pressed against French colonial boulevards, Soviet-style housing blocks rising beside Art Deco apartment buildings, new luxury developments casting shadows over crumbling infrastructure.

But the film is less interested in architectural taxonomy than in the emotional geography of displacement. As Ferhani's father walks through neighborhoods he's known for decades, he encounters streetscapes that have been fundamentally altered, sometimes overnight. Buildings he remembers are gone. Trees have been cut down. Public spaces have been privatized or simply abandoned.

The jacarandas of the title become a recurring motif — not just as beautiful trees, but as markers of a particular vision of the city that no longer exists. Imported during the French colonial period, they've become contested symbols, simultaneously representing imposed foreign aesthetics and a lost urban beauty that transcends political categories.

The Archive of One Man's Memory

What makes "Alea Jacarandas" particularly compelling is Ferhani's resistance to simple nostalgia. His father's memories are presented not as definitive historical record but as one person's subjective experience — valuable precisely because official histories often exclude such personal perspectives.

The film employs a patient, observational style that allows moments to unfold without editorial urgency. Conversations between father and son meander, circle back, pause. Silences are given space. The camera often lingers on architectural details or street scenes after the human subjects have left the frame, suggesting that the city itself has stories to tell.

This approach aligns with Ferhani's broader filmmaking practice. His previous documentary "143 Sahara Street" spent time with a woman running a remote roadside restaurant in the Algerian desert, finding profound questions about isolation and connection in an apparently simple setting. He brings the same attentiveness to his father's Algiers, treating familiar urban spaces with the careful observation usually reserved for exotic locations.

Documentary as Family Conversation

The relationship between filmmaker and subject is never hidden in "Alea Jacarandas." Ferhani's presence behind the camera is acknowledged, sometimes through his voice asking questions, sometimes through his father's direct address to the lens. This transparency about the constructed nature of documentary becomes part of the film's meaning.

By making his father the central figure, Ferhani engages with questions about who gets to tell Algeria's stories and how those stories are transmitted across generations. The film becomes a kind of intergenerational dialogue, with the camera serving as both mediator and witness.

There's also an underlying urgency to this documentation. Ferhani's father is aging, and with him, a particular lived experience of Algiers is fading. The film becomes an act of preservation, even as it acknowledges that film can only capture fragments, approximations, shadows of actual experience.

Context of Contemporary Algerian Cinema

"Alea Jacarandas" arrives at a moment when Algerian cinema is experiencing renewed international attention, according to Screen Daily. Filmmakers like Karim Moussaoui, Sofia Djama, and Mounia Meddour have brought Algerian stories to major festivals in recent years, often exploring the country's complex relationship with its past.

Ferhani's work distinguishes itself through its formal approach and its focus on the quotidian rather than the dramatic. While other films tackle Algeria's civil war of the 1990s or contemporary political struggles directly, "Alea Jacarandas" finds political meaning in the seemingly apolitical — in urban planning decisions, in what gets preserved and what gets demolished, in whose memories are valued and whose are dismissed.

The film's premiere in Visions du Réel's Burning Lights competition — a section dedicated to bold, innovative documentary work — positions it within a global conversation about documentary form and the possibilities of nonfiction cinema.

Memory Against Forgetting

Ultimately, "Alea Jacarandas" is a film about the struggle to remember in a context that often seems designed to induce forgetting. Whether through deliberate political erasure or the simple passage of time, the Algiers that Ferhani's father knew is disappearing.

But the film suggests that memory itself is a form of resistance. By documenting his father's recollections, by walking through the city with attention and care, Ferhani creates a counter-archive — one that privileges personal experience over official narrative, that values the small details that give a place its particular character.

The jacarandas may be gone, but the film preserves them. Not the actual trees, but something perhaps more important: the memory of what it felt like to walk beneath them, to live in a city where they transformed ordinary streets into something extraordinary, if only for a few weeks each spring.

In this way, "Alea Jacarandas" becomes both elegy and act of preservation, a son's gift to his father and a filmmaker's gift to a city that is constantly becoming something other than itself.