Nabil Djedouani

In There Is No End, Nabil Djedouani – filmmaker, archivist and researcher – stages a fictional investigation surrounding two Algerian figures of the underground international anti-colonial resistance. Mohamed Boudia (1932–1973) was an activist and theatre director, who died during a bomb attack in Paris, while Boubaker Adjali alias Kapiaça, alias Nicolaus Husseini (1939–2007) was a photographer, reporter and diplomat, who served multiple liberation movements across the African and Asian continents. The two men crossed paths in the West Bank at the end of the 1960s, but very few traces remain of their encounter including a script of a disappeared film they co-directed entitled We Exist and a surviving fragment of the film. They are the clues around which the investigation unfolds. Throughout their journeys, the two characters endorsed multiple identities and pseudonyms as their lives swayed between fiction and reality. Strategies devised by Boudia and Adjali to cover their tracks inspired Djedouani to compose this work. Not all elements used in the investigation are real archival documents and the visitor has to actively take part in deciphering and following the fugitive militants’ trails. By connecting seemingly heterogeneous elements, Djedouani foregrounds the secret histories of dissidence and clandestinity that link them.