Reclaiming Zaphira: Feminism, self-orientalization and national myth-making in The Last Queen

Few cinematic projects are as politically loaded as those that reclaim the past through myth. El Akhira ( The Last Queen , 2022), Algeria’s first big-budget historical epic, dramatizes the legend of Zaphira, a sixteenth-century queen recovered from the margins of history and transformed into a symbol of feminist resistance and national identity. While the film aspires to reclaim a suppressed Algerian heroine, its visual and narrative strategies reproduce the very conventions it seeks to overcome. Drawing on feminist and postcolonial film theory, this article examines how The Last Queen frames Zaphira’s agency as a woman, performs self-orientalization and constructs national myth, arguing that the conditions shaping that reclamation are inseparable from the forces that produced the erasure it seeks to correct. In doing so, it contributes to debates on Algerian and Maghrebi cinema’s negotiation of representation, history and global visibility.