A prize winner at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, Bled Number One is director Rabah Ameur-Zaimeche’s follow-up to his well-regarded debut Wesh-Wesh (What’s Going On?) of 2001. It features the same character, Kamel (played by the director), who returns to his hometown, somewhere in Algeria, having been deported from France after a prison term. In forced exile, Kamel becomes a lucid observer of a society in turmoil as Algeria is torn between the urge to modernise and the weight of ancestral tradition. Although the film speaks volumes about the conditions of life in today’s Algeria, the director doesn’t use his central character as a vehicle for a social thesis. Instead he devises a new realism, one tinted with fantasy elements, to explore life in all its strangeness.