Dania Reymond-Boughenou’s feature debut emerges from a striking opening image: strange storms of yellow dust. A journalist (Papicha’s Khaled Benaissa) arrives in a war-torn zone to cover this baffling phenomenon, only to be confronted by the apparition of his late wife (Camélia Jordana from Love Affair(s)), who was brutally murdered years before. Drawing on her Algerian heritage, Reymond-Boughenou transposes the Dark Decade of her homeland into a fictional setting in this speculative drama, providing an ideal backdrop against which to explore the themes of forgetting and loss inexorably tied to civil war. Rich with haunting imagery, she successfully interweaves elements of the classic ghost story with historical dystopia in a mesmerising oxymoron of sorts. Photography by Augustin Barbaroux (And Their Children After Them) and an evocative score by Dan Levy (I Lost My Body) further enhance the film’s poetic and profoundly atmospheric charm.