Roqia follows Ahmed, who in 1993 survives a car crash only to awaken with no memory of his family or village. Shrouded in bandages and alienated from his own children, he becomes plagued by unsettling nightly visits and the unease of a neighbor who seems more threatening than familiar. In the present, an ageing Raqi, a Muslim exorcist, battles Alzheimer’s, his fading memory raising fears that his decline could unleash a long-dormant evil, as violence once again looms over the city.
Through this dual narrative, Koussim weaves a story that is as much about Algeria’s painful recent history as it is about the universal struggle against fear and the persistence of evil. Yanis Koussim reflects on the film’s layered structure, the role of religious ritual, and the resonance of bringing Roqia from Algeria’s memory to the world stage in Venice.
AM: Roqia intertwines two timelines, Ahmed in the 1990s and the ageing exorcist in the present day. What inspired you to create this dual narrative structure, and how do the two stories speak to each other?
Yanis Koussim: Actually, it wasn’t inspiration but necessity. I initially struggled to keep the script within a single timeline, the present, but the weight of the backstory was too important to remain outside the narrative. It needed to be treated inside the story itself. On the surface, the two timelines seem different, but they are intimately connected from the very beginning. They converge at the end, and that’s precisely when we realize they were linked all along.
AM: The film touches on themes of memory, trauma, and the supernatural. How do you see the relationship between personal amnesia and collective forgetting in Algeria’s recent history?
Yanis Koussim: The forgetting is collective, not individual. The characters’ memory loss, whether caused by amnesia or illness, functions as an allegory for this collective forgetting. And when we forget evil, it comes back. In that sense, memory, or the lack of it, becomes central to the return of violence.
AM: Religious rituals and the figure of the Raqi are central to the story. What drew you to explore the world of exorcism, and how did you approach portraying it without falling into sensationalism or cliché?
Yanis Koussim: It was very important to me to respect, to the extreme, the ritual of Roqia el char3ia while staying grounded in reality. I believe that’s what allowed me to avoid sensationalism or cliché. The more realistic a horror film is, the truer the fear becomes. Reality is always scarier than the supernatural.
AM: Violence seems to hover in the background of Roqia. How did you use the horror and mystery elements of the film to comment on deeper social or political realities?
Yanis Koussim: Honestly, I didn’t approach it consciously. At times, the story almost started writing itself. The connections between real violence and the horror and mystery genre imposed themselves naturally during the writing process. I embraced that, and the result is the film you see. In this case, horror and reality intertwined on their own terms.
AM: Fear plays a key role. What did you want to say about fear as both a personal and collective experience?
Yanis Koussim: For me, fear is instinct. I wouldn’t know how to theorize it. In the 1990s, Algeria lived through fear. To tell that period is to tell fear itself. The characters in Roqia, whether in the past or present, are afraid in the same way Algerians were and still are. Afraid of evil, of violence, of its return. But fear is also survival. Evolutionary theory tells us: fear equals vigilance equals flight equals survival. Fear isn’t weakness; it’s strength. It keeps you alive.
AM: What does it mean to you to bring Roqia to the Venice Film Festival, and how do you hope international audiences will connect with a story so deeply rooted in Algerian memory and culture?
Yanis Koussim: If Roqia is an Algerian story, the fight against evil is universal. Humanity has always fought evil, through religion, shamanism, or secular rituals. Evil is a destructive force that has struck humankind throughout history. The evil faced in Roqia and in Algeria in the 1990s is the same humanity has fought before: absolute evil. Terrorism, Nazism, colonialism, slavery, the Inquisition, and today, Zionism with the ongoing genocide in Ghazza, it is all the same malevolent energy. Whether in Venice, Algiers, or elsewhere, unfortunately, we all recognize this absolute evil.