Cheikh Djemaï

Cheikh Djemaï, born in 1954 near Maghnia in Algeria, is a Franco-Algerian director. Coming with his family to join a father who spent a time in the mines of the North, Cheikh Djemaï grew up after 1959 in the shanty town of rue des Prés then in the André Doucet transit city known as the “old city”, both located in the Chemin de the island. Cheikh Djemaï left exceptional housing in the 1970s, bruised by bullying and forced orientations in the Voltaire schools and at the Joliot Curie college where he was oriented in CEP molding. He became closer to theater (as a lighting designer at the Théâtre des Amandiers), culture and politics thanks to his older brother, himself linked to Christian activists working with immigrants in Nanterre. During these ten years spent at the Amandiers theater in Nanterre, he rubbed shoulders with the greatest: traveling companions of Pierre Debauche, Antoine Vitez, Patrice Chéreau, Roger Planchon, Daniel Mesguish, at Wajda. Little by little, he embarked on a ca...