From Algiers the group took a bus for 13 hours through the desert to Hassi Messaoud in the eastern province where they were passed to another group of Algerian smugglers, who demanded another $800 per person.
By day, the streets of downtown Algiers are thronged with unemployed young men who dream of France but have no chance of getting the visas they need to get there.
Director Sarah Maldoror studied in Moscow, worked on the classic The Battle of Algiers, then grabbed African cinema by the scruff of the neck, forcing it to engage with feminism, loss and movie aesthetics.
It was getting dark and Algiers was emptying out for the night.
All the time, I had been dreaming of visiting Algeria, of seeing Algiers, the capital of French north Africa.
Rather, the sense of the uncanny you meet during a first trip to Algiers is classically Freudian: it is the dream-like sense that, without knowing it, you have already been here before.
It is this work that, in recent years, has taken me from Bucharest to Algiers to Montreal.
Mossad operatives were in northern Iraq training Kurdish fighters for the battles with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, until the Shah pulled the plug, ending support for the Kurdish rebellion with his 1975 Algiers agreement with Saddam.
When I finally arrived in Algiers for the first time in 2009, the city I found was not like this.
Walking down through Algiers from the Casbah is an eerie experience.
It is also because walking through Algiers is like walking through the wreckage of a recently abandoned civilisation, whose citizens have only just departed in a hurry, leaving behind them their most personal possessions which you immediately recognise.
