Thursday, December 11, 2025
A00300 - Biyouna, Algerian Film Star
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Biyouna بيونة | |
|---|---|
 Biyouna in 2011 | |
| Background information | |
| Born | Baya Bouzar 13 September 1952 |
| Died | 25 November 2025 (aged 73) Algiers, Algeria |
| Genres | |
| Occupations |
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| Instruments |
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| Years active | 1973–2025 |
| Labels | Warner |
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Baya Bouzar (Arabic: باية بوزار; 13 September 1952 – 25 November 2025), known by the stage name Biyouna (بيونة), was an Algerian singer, dancer and actress.[1]
Early life
Biyouna was born on 13 September 1952 in the Belcourt neighbourhood of Algiers.[2] Having a very early passion for singing, she was a member of several groups: first in Fadhéla Dziria's group where she played tambourine, another that she directed with her partner Flifla, and finally her own where she was the main vocalist and became sought after for wedding receptions.
At the age of 17, she began performing in some of the biggest cabarets in the city and at 19 started dancing at the Copacabana.[citation needed]
Acting career
That same year, the director Mustapha Badie gave her a singing part in his first soap opera, La Grande Maison (1973), where she played Fatma. This show was adapted from a novel by Mohamed Dib. She became well-known thanks to this role.
She appeared in two Algerian films: Leila and the others, by Sid Ali Mazif in 1978, and The Neighbor, by Ghaouti Bendedouche in 2000. She also performed some one-woman shows. In 1999, Nadir Moknèche offered her the role of Meriem in Madame Osmane's Harem which she produced in France. This film was followed by Viva Laldjéri in 2003.
Between 2002 and 2005, Biyouna had success with a trilogy based on the theme of Ramadan called Nass Mlah City.
She appeared in the last film of Nadir Moknèche, Délice Paloma (2007), where she played the main character, a mafiosa named Madame Aldjeria. In 2006 she performed the role of Coryphée in Sophocles' Elektra beside Jane Birkin in an opera directed by Philippe Calvaio. In 2007 she had a small role in the Algerian film Rendez-vous avec le destin.
In 2009, she played La Celestina at the Vingtième Théâtre in Paris. For Ramadan, 2010, Biyouna was one of the stars in a sitcom broadcast on Nessma TV, Nsibti Laaziza.
Musical career
Meanwhile, she continued her singing career, and in 2001 issued the album Raid Zone, produced with the composer John Bagnolett. After the success of this album and her participation in Jérome Savary's Opéra de Casbah she brought out another album called Blonde dans la casbah. She had been planning this album for some time. Biyouna took her time, carefully choosing a Franco-Algerian repertoire which explored both cultures.
Personal life and death
Biyouna lived with her husband and four children in a suburb of Algiers.[citation needed] She died on 25 November 2025, at the age of 73.[3]
Discography
- 2001: Raid Zone
- 2007: Blonde dans la Casbah
Singles
- "Pamela" (2001)
- "Les yeux noirs" (2002)
- "In her eyes" (2002)
- "Tu es ma vie" (2002)
- "Maoudlik" (2003)
- "Taali" (2006)
- "Une Blonde Platine dans la Casbah " (2007)
- "Demain tu te maries" (2007)
- "Merci pour tout (c'que j'n'ai pas)" (2007)
- "El Bareh" (2008)
- "Tsaabli ouetmili" (2008)
Filmography
Films
| Year | Title | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1978 | Leila et les autres | ||
| 1979 | Le Chat | ||
| 1999 | Le Harem de madame Osmane | Meriem | |
| 2001 | La voisine | ||
| 2003 | Viva Laldjérie | Papicha | |
| 2004 | Beur blanc rouge | Mother of Wassila | |
| 2005 | Rue des figuiers | Fatima | |
| 2007 | Delice Paloma | Madame Aldjeria/Zineb Agha | |
| 2008 | Garçon manqué | Nana | |
| 2009 | Aïcha | Biyouna | |
| 2010 | Bacon on the Side | Houria | |
| 2010 | Holiday | Eva Lopez | |
| 2011 | Aïcha 2 | Biyouna | |
| 2011 | The Source | The Old Gun | |
| 2011 | Beur sur la ville | Khalid's mother | |
| 2011 | Aïcha 3 | Biyouna | |
| 2012 | Aïcha 4 | Biyouna | |
| 2013 | Cheba Louisa | ||
| 2013 | Mohamed Dubois | ||
| 2013 | Les Reines du ring | ||
| 2014 | Amour sur place ou à emporter : le film ! | ||
| 2018 | Le Flic de Belleville | Zohra |
Television
| Year | Title | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1973 | La Grande Maison | Fatma | |
| 2003 | Grand plongeoir, Le | Herself | |
| 2003 | Nass Mlah City | 32 episodes | |
| 2004 | Nass Mlah City 2 | 32 episodes | |
| 2006 | Nass Mlah City 3 | 55 episodes | |
| 2007 | La Commune | Hanifa Houbeyche | first season |
| 2007 | On n'est pas couché | 1 episode | |
| 2009 | Nessma TV (Zorroh) | Zohra | |
| 2010 | One person show | Biyouna | 30 episodes |
| 2012 | La Baie d'Alger |
Theater
| Year | Title | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2009 | La Celestina | Célestine | |
| 2012 | Biyouna ! | Biyouna | in Théâtre Marigny |
References
- "بيونة الجزائرية الحرّة". الأخبار (in Arabic). Retrieved 5 February 2018.
- Nossiter, Adam (30 November 2025). "Biyouna, Algerian Star With Tart Tongue Onscreen and Off, Dies at 73". The New York Times. Retrieved 2 December 2025.
- حمدي, رشال (25 November 2025). "La star de la comédie algérienne Biyouna tire sa révérence".
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Biyouna, Algerian Star With Tart Tongue Onscreen and Off, Dies at 73
For generations of Algerians, the fierce independence of her persona reflected their struggles in a country torn by civil war and repression.
Baya Bouzar, an actress and singer known as Biyouna whose guttural voice, sharp tongue and fierce independence — onscreen and off — incarnated, for generations of Algerians, their struggles in a country torn by civil war and repression, died on Tuesday at a hospital in Algiers. She was 73.
Her death from lung cancer was announced by President Abdelmadjid Tebboune of Algeria, who said she “left behind a legacy of sincerity and spontaneity in acting and successful cinematic works, earning her widespread appreciation.”
Official recognition came to her from the seat of Algeria’s autocratic power, but there were also hundreds of fans at her funeral. Ms. Bouzar, with her instantly recognizable physiognomy — prominent nose, black eyes and jet-black hair — was a hero in the working-class Algiers neighborhoods from which she had sprung.
Such fervent public mourning was due as much to her caustic free spirit in dozens of television and film roles as for her widely acknowledged courage during what Algerians call the “Black Decade” of civil war in the 1990s. Artists, writers, actors and journalists fled the country; some were killed, mostly by Islamist insurgents who had taken up arms against the military government that seized power in a 1992 coup.
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Biyouna stayed. But from 1994 to 1996, she ceased singing and acting, under the threats of Islamists who took a harsh view of women in nontraditional roles outside the home.
“When the threats became too much, I went to Oran to stay with my mother-in-law,” she recalled to Le Monde. “I lasted two months. I prefer the terrorists.”
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In other interviews, she liked to revel in her reputation for bothering “highly placed people” among the civilian authorities and mocking her dubious standing among “the religious ones.”
The actress explained that she did not want to “abandon” her neighbors and her admirers. “Oh sure, I went into the areas threatened by the GIA,” using the French initials for the fundamentalist Armed Islamic Group, anti-government insurgents, she said in a 2012 interview with the France Culture radio station. “But I wasn’t the only one. And I overcame my fear.”
“I would go out to do the marketing with my children, and people would say, ‘Biyouna, you’re not leaving, are you?’” Ms. Bouzar told the French radio station France Inter in 2018.
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Ms. Bouzar had become a star on both sides of the Mediterranean largely thanks to the films of the Franco-Algerian director Nadir Moknèche. Of “Le Harem de Mme Osmane” (2000), about a group of women bursting out of traditional roles in Algiers just as the civil war commences, she later said she was “the only one of the actresses to have lived the story from the inside.”
In “Viva Laldjérie” (2004), she played an ex-cabaret dancer fighting alongside other women against Islamist strictures near the end of the Black Decade.
In her 2011 appearance on the French television series “Aïcha,” about the struggles of immigrant families in the suburbs, she was immortalized for many French viewers when she yelled “pouffiasse” (tart) at the character played by the actress Isabelle Adjani. “I’m more of an Algerian woman than you!” Ms. Bouzar screamed at the younger woman. For her fans, there was nobody more Algerian than she.
That status was consecrated in the early 1970s when at barely 20, she was given a prominent role as Fatma, a tough, enduring Algerian woman in a 12-part series on the nascent national television station.
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It had been little over a decade since the French had been kicked out of Algeria, after a bloody uprising that lasted nearly a decade; the series, “The Fire” (Al Hariq), an adaptation of a 1950s nationalist trilogy by the novelist Mohammed Dib, became a cult hit in a country that saw itself at the vanguard of post-colonial revolution. “The Fire” captured, in a kind of socialist-realism style, the sufferings of a hungry people struggling under French rule in the late 1930s.
“I was in the role of a shrew, completely untamed,” Ms. Bouzar told France Culture in 2012. “A pain in the ass for all the neighbors. And everybody saw themselves in me.”
Because of “The Fire,” Ms. Bouzar became “THE ‘Fatma’ of the little people of Algiers, the most atypical and yet credible of anybody on the country’s single television channel,” the Franco-Algerian journalist Tewfik Hakem wrote of her in 2002.
At that point, “Biyouna was her countrymen’s longtime accomplice,” Mr. Hakem wrote, “a little crazy but always getting it right as the shrewish big sister or the indignant mother.”
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Baya Bouzar was born in Algiers on Sept. 13, 1952, in Belcourt (now Belouizdad), a working-class neighborhood that had also once been home to the Nobel laureate Albert Camus. Her mother, Djamila Bouzar, was a cashier at a movie theater showing Egyptian movies, and Ms. Bouzar attributed her love of acting to sneaking into her mother’s place of work. Her father, Bouzar Saidi, was a nightclub employee, according to Rahim Bounemri of Algeria’s Ennahar television.
“I had barely emerged from the weeds, and I was already dancing in the living room, causing a scandal,” Ms. Bouzar said of her childhood in a 2018 interview with the French radio station France Inter. “My grandmother said I had a genie in my soul.”
As a teenager, she danced with Fadhéla Dziria, a pioneer of the working-class Hawzi style of singing and who also led a women’s orchestra. Ms. Bouzar was not yet 20 when the Algerian director Mustapha Badie spotted her, giving her the role in “The Fire” that launched her career.
According to Le Monde, devastating flooding in the Bab el-Oued neighborhood of Algiers forced Ms. Bouzar and her four children to evacuate their apartment, and a subsequent suicide attempt was reported by tabloid newspapers. “Me and the shrinks, I don’t go to ’em too much. If I go to the shrink, he’ll wind up on the couch,” she told France Inter in 2018.
After her recovery, she brought her one-woman shows to theaters in Paris and released an album “Blonde dans la Casbah.”
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Ms. Bouzar is survived by two daughters, Louisa and Amel; two sons, Salim and Adel; and her fourth husband, Mokhtar Bouchaala. Previous marriages ended in divorce.
“You brought joy where it was lacking, and light to an environment that you called sad and hypocritical,” the Algerian director Bachir Derraïs said in a tribute to Ms. Bouzar this week.