Sofia Djama / The Blessed

Born in Oran in 1979, Sofia Djama moved to Algiers to complete her Bachelor’s degree in literature. In the early 2000s, she began a collection of short stories in which the city of Algiers served as the protagonist. One of those stories was the basis for her first short film, Mollement un Samedi Matin (Limply One Saturday Morning), which received two awards at the Clermont-Ferrand festival.

This encouraged her to pursue a career in film, and she devoted herself to writing the script of her first feature, The Blessed, which won three awards at the Venice Film Festival, including the Brian Award for films that “best champion human rights, democracy, pluralism and freedom of thought” and the Lina Mangiacapre Award for films that “change the image of women in cinema.”