Mohammed Soudani

Biography

Mohammed Soudani (محمد سوداني), born in 1949 in Chlef, Algeria, is a cinematographer and director of Algerian and Swiss nationalities. After his schooling in Algeria, he studied at the Institute of Advanced Cinematographic Studies (IDHEC) in Paris. In 1980, Mohammed Soudani completed his training as a director of photography in the United States. He is a cinematographer on the feature films of Sidiki Bakaba and Roger Gnoan M'Bala in Ivory Coast. Mohammed Soudani has lived in the canton of Ticino in Switzerland since 1972, he is of Algerian and Swiss nationality. The specificity of Mohammed Soudani's cinematography is these different cultures, Algerian, sub-Saharan and Swiss. The first two films he made were documentaries: Nawa, Man and Water and Yiribakro, Sacred Wood. These films are the start of an initiatory journey for the filmmaker into the world of the sacred where ancestral animist practices mingle with other religious rituals. In 1998, Mohammed Soudani made his first feature film, Waalo Fendo - The Day the Earth Freezes, the story of a young Senegalese immigrant in Milan who brings his brother to Europe. A perfect example of integration, Mohammed Soudani won the Swiss Film Award for best fiction film with this feature film. In parallel with this work as a director, Mohammed Soudani works as a director of photography for RTS (Swiss Radio and Television). He teaches audiovisual at SUPSI, the Higher University School of Italian-speaking Switzerland, and is also a producer at Amka films. In 2002, Mohammed Soudani conceived the documentary, War without images - Algeria, I know that you know, with Michael von Graffenried, the only Western photographer who continued to work in Algeria during the 10 years of civil war. The filmmaker returns to his homeland after thirty years of absence. He searches for people that Michael von Graffenried photographed a few years earlier to find out what happened to them. The film addresses both the fate of the human being behind the photograph, but also the requirements and limits of taking pictures, of the use and abuse of images.