SALVATION ARMY
(L’ARMEE DE SALUT)
dir. Abdellah Taïa, 2014
France/Morocco. 80 min.
In French and Arabic with English subtitles.

TUESDAY, JUNE 2 – 10 PM
SUNDAY, JUNE 8 – 5 PM followed by Q+A with Abdellah Taïa
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 18 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, JUNE 27 – 5 PM

Abdellah is a young gay man navigating the sexual, racial and political climate of Morocco. Growing up in a large family in a working-class neighborhood, Abdellah is caught between a distant father, an authoritarian mother, an older brother whom he adores and a handful of predatory older men, in a society that denies his homosexuality. As a college student, Abdellah moves to Geneva and while faced with the new possibilities of freedom, he grapples with the loss of his homeland.

Adapted directly from Taïa’s eponymous 2009 novel, SALVATION ARMY is a quietly confrontational debut that draws explicitly from the novelist-filmmaker’s experience as trauma survivor and closeted gay man in Morocco. Shot by legendary cinematographer Agnès Godard (with whom Taïa determined to collaborate after seeing her work on Claire Denis’ NENETTE AND BONI), it also measures the consequences of abuse – whether from family or from once-trusted elder role model figures – with a surprisingly restrained style. Taïa’s refusal to sentimentalize or sensationalize makes SALVATION ARMY all the more searing in its muted depiction of a young man’s forbidden coming of age.

“When I was a teenager, any signs of a well-accepted homosexuality were absent from real life and from Arab movies… Homosexuality was constantly associated with mental illness, social shame, a sin. To survive I had to make up my own cultural codes. I had to convince myself I had that right. The exclusion and the solitude were not always easy to bear. Much later, at the age of twenty, I discovered secondary characters who bore some signs of homosexuality in movies by Youssef Chahine, Salah Abou Seif or Yousry Nassrallah. But they were not totally in the light. Something was missing… In the collective Arab mind, there is no homosexual hero.” – Abdellah Taïa