Underground discos thud to the beat of dance music as men and women dress to the nines and slip through checkpoints to party the night away. Meanwhile, fingers on triggers, tensions mount between armed police forces and anti-government guerillas.

This is Algiers in the 1990’s, and what headstrong fashion student Nedjma, played by Lyna Khoudri (The French Dispatch), doesn’t know, is that her life is about to change forever.

Lifting the lid on the radical events of the Algerian Civil War, Mounia Meddour’s Papicha follows the trials and tribulations of a group of determined young women as they come face to face with a new, dangerous reality.

Papicha is presented in partnership with T A P E Collective. T A P E Collective, consisting of Isra Al Kassi, Angela Moneke, and Nellie Alston launched in 2015 as a film collective responding to the lack of representation on screen, it has now expanded to cross-art curation, producing and platforming short films weekly on new platform Good Wickedry. T A P E's continued goal is to build a stronger and more nuanced, but also universal, picture of the make-up of our cinematic world.