In this extraordinary documentary, we hear from a wide range of Algerian women about their half of Allah's Heaven, and of Allah's Hell to boot. The film moves between "forgotten" archival footage, not only of the oft-occluded contributions women made to Algeria's Independence struggle but also of their later confinement under the family code laws of the 1970s, and interviews with contemporary Algerians, young and old, rich and poor. Director Djamila Sahraoui constructs a tragic, yet uplifting, portrait of what it means to be an Algerian woman, then in combat against colonialism, now in the face of an Islamic "intrégisme" which is about as un-integrationist as you can get. As she says, Algerian women continue to struggle on with their lives, constrained as before by History and Men, "but this time the struggle is for life..."-I.B./L.T.