At My Age, I Still Hide to Smoke (Dir. Rayhana Obermeyer) is set in Algiers in 1995 in Fatima’s hammam. Rendered as a refuge for women from a rapidly transforming, politically turbulent, independent Algiers, which now seeks to efface women from the public realm. The movie centres around Meriem, a pregnant 16-year-old who runs to Fatima’s hammam on a seemingly normal day covered in blood, asking for refuge. Fatima hides Meriem in the Hamam, secluded from the others, hoping to avert Meriem from her brother’s mania of cleansing his honour with his sister’s blood. The hammam otherwise operates normally, with women coming – carrying gossip, their children, and their dreams. The hamam becomes a construction of safety for these women, a place where they can come for but a few minutes, maybe hours, to humour half-fledged liberty. Although Meriem is kept hidden most of the time, hiding too finds its way amongst the women above her. The hammam is transformed into an intimate place; a host to these women’s secrets and confrontations as they unveil, lash out and take solace in their temporary freedoms. Their silences gradually break as discreet exchanges of contraception, dreams, sexual desire or just a place where everyday conversations can take place. The realities of the women of the hammam vary -from that of wife, the divorcee, the religious, the old and defeatist and the young and hopeful- it thus becomes a host for a series of political confrontations. The movie builds up a diverse and intergenerational narrative of Algerian women that although fictional, it is still far from imaginary. The movie critiques the takeover of extremist Islamist rhetoric in Algeria, as much it mocks French imperialism’s enduring mark on Algerian politics and its society, a comment perhaps on how colonialism’s mutilation of Algeria’s past found a pathway to its future. 

Hiding takes various forms in the film; literal, figurative and linguistic. Meriem hides from her brother, the women hide from society, and in conversations through language. Articulation itself becomes a double-sided knife, where gendered self-determination stumbles into yet another threat, but now post-independence in a seemingly sovereign country. In the case of Algeria, the struggle for independence had Algerian women standing in the frontiers of resistance before quickly becoming mere symbols of the struggle, lacking in representation or rights post-independence. With the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the 1990s and the Arabisation movement, Algerian women who were more adept to the colonial Franca lingua, as opposed to Arabic, had to accept their fates as unemployable or dependent. Women ponder and laugh about their fates as unemployable for not mastering Arabic, but how are they to be blamed? A sense of awareness penetrates when women are fluctuating between languages, mainly between Arabic and French. Here the women are presented with both a challenge and an escape. When talking about sexual pleasure, terminologies seem to be obsolete in Arabic, almost non-existent. A character ponders why the word orgasm exists in French but not in Arabic, partly because such articulations are increasingly censored in society and even when found, the shame that accompanies its acknowledgement coerces vocals into silence. Women seem to hide even within a language, approaching their sexualities with more caution in one linguistic realm to the other -seemingly because such sentiments are not allowed to be legitimized through language. Issues intermingle as the womens’ confrontations become more explicit, critiques that all overlap to conclude the hijacking of Algerian independence by a conflated image of Islam. The issue of patriarchy and Islamic fundamentalism are addressed fearlessly throughout the movie. Towards the end, Obermeyer leaves us with a visualization of a suppressed revolution, a revolution that never came to fruition. As a group of armed men forcefully burst into the hammam, led by Fatima’s brother, the women of the hamam exit in defiance and the men in turn retreat. For a moment, it seems as if the women have won. 

Obermeyer leaves us with a riveting story of women seeking solace in each other’s company at a time and place when they have few opportunities to express themselves freely. A story that although is set in 1955, still resonates in its relevance. The filming of her subjects in different natural stages of undressing is a political act in and of itself, an authentically human feminist cri-de coeur of women ready to unite, in opposition to a world that engulfs and excludes all at once.