This paper examines three women’s films that are focused on documenting experiences of violence and trauma in modern Algeria, a country that has been the site of violence over different periods. Through their female protagonists, films such as Yamina Bachir’s Rachida (2002), and Djamila Sahraoui’s Barakat (2006) and Yema (2012) represent the traumatic events in Algeria during the civil war in the 1990’s and their effects on women. Like their cinematic predecessor The Battle of Algiers (1966), these films respond to and attempt to manage traumas specific to a historical moment. Both Yamina Bachir and Djamila Sahraoui use cinematic techniques to highlight their female protagonists' constant anxiety about the chaos enveloping Algeria. Drawing on Judith Butler’s books Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (2004),and Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? this paper interrogates the female protagonists’ fortitude as well as their precarious position in the face of terrorism. While the films highlight women’s crucial roles within the community, they depict men as powerless. I will show how women’s precarious situation in the films is caused not just by terrorism but also by men’s lack of masculinity. Drawing on Kaja Silverman’s book Male Subjectivity at the Margins, the paper further highlights how in all three films, masculine flaws and vulnerabilities are openly exposed rather than being concealed. The structuring use of the camera also includes the process of using woman-ness as a potentially liberating force from the violence. Women’s “becoming” in the films allows them to recover from the violence, resisting narratives of chaos. Luce Irigaray explains this notion of becoming in terms of the formation and transformation of women’s identity. The paper will thus raise questions concerning not only suffering, trauma, and violence, but also men’s wounded masculinities as well as women’s vulnerability and resistance.