Abd El-Kader

In Mansourah You Separated Us

November 2019 •French

Originally there was a silence. That of Malek, the filmmaker’s father, who for years said nothing of his childhood in Algeria. And then, the need to break the silence, with a script that he gives to his children, to start telling his story. Several years later, the father and daughter finally make the journey to Mansourah, his native village: seeing his house, meeting other men who experienced the same heartbreak. Little by little, the film reveals what Malek, like many others, has long kept quiet about.

My Story Is Not Yet Written

June 2017 •French

Jacqueline Gozlan - who left Algeria with her parents in 1961 - nostalgically retraces the history of the Algiers Cinematheque, inseparable from that of the country's Independence, through film extracts and numerous testimonies; notably that of one of its creators, Jean-Michel Arnold, but also of filmmakers such as Merzak Allouache and critics such as Jean Douchet. A place of life for Algerians, the Cinémathèque was the hub of African cinemas. Created in 1965 by Ahmed Hocine, Mahieddine Moussaoui and Jean-Michel Arnold, the Cinémathèque benefited from the excitement of Independence. The Cinematheque becomes a meeting place for Algiers society, future filmmakers find their best school there. In 1969, the Algiers Pan-African Festival brought together all African filmmakers, and from 1970, Boudjemâa Kareche developed a collection of Arab and African films.

Many Beautiful Things

October 2015 •English

In an age when women were incapable of joining the artistic dialogue, Lilias Trotter managed to win the favour of celebrated critics.

Frantz Fanon: His Life, His Struggle, His Work

November 2001 •French

It is the evocation of a life as brief as it is dense. An encounter with a dazzling thought, that of Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist of West Indian origin, who will reflect on the alienation of black people. It is the evocation of a man of reflection who refuses to close his eyes, of the man of action who devoted himself body and soul to the liberation struggle of the Algerian people and who will become, through his political commitment, his fight, and his writings, one of the figures of the anti-colonialist struggle. Before being killed at the age of 36 by leukemia, on December 6, 1961. His body was buried by Chadli Bendjedid, who later became Algerian president, in Algeria, at the Chouhadas cemetery (cemetery of war martyrs ). With him, three of his works are buried: “Black Skin, White Masks”, “L’An V De La Révolution Algérien” and “The Wretched of the Earth”.

Our Algeria

January 1959 •Arabic

"Djazaïrouna", produced by the cinema service of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA), is a montage film intended to inform the international community at the UN in 1959 on the objectives pursued by the Algerian resistance during the war of 'Algeria. Independence in Algeria (1954-1962). In 1959, Djamel-Eddine Chanderli and Mohammed Lakdar-Hamina produced Djazaïrouna (Our Algeria) from images taken by René Vautier and Doctor Pierre Chaulet. This film, completed a little later and will result in the film “The Voice of the People”. This documentary on the history of Algeria through a montage of current events, traces the political and military actions of the A.L.N, the demonstrations of December 1960, and the attack on a fortified French base on the border between Algeria and Tunisia.

China Is Still Far

April 2010 •Arabic

On November 1, 1954, near Ghassira, a small village lost in the Aurès, a couple of French teachers and an Algerian boss were the first civilian victims of a seven-year war which would lead to the independence of Algeria. More than fifty years later, Malek Bensmaïl returns to this Chaoui village, which has become “the cradle of the Algerian revolution”, to film, throughout the seasons, its inhabitants, its school and its children.

Pornotropic

September 2020 •French

When French writer Marguerite Duras (1914-96) published her novel The Sea Wall in 1950, she came very close to winning the prestigious Prix Goncourt. Meanwhile, in Indochina, France was suffering its first military defeats in its war against the Việt Minh, the rebel movement for independence.

Planet Malek

January 2019 •French

Ahmed Malek’s name might have been forgotten by his fellow Algerians but his timeless tunes certainly haven’t. Called the Ennio Morricone of Algiers, he composed music for more than 200 movies, amongst which the most famous films of the Algerian New Wave in the 70s and the 80s can be found. Paloma Colombe, a DJ, digger and documentary director, went to Algiers to meet his daughter, friends and former coworkers. Images of the city by night offer a perfect background to Ahmed Malek’s music. Globetrotter, pioneer of electronic music and of the concept of the home studio, he created a unique sound that truly goes beyond genres and countries.

Déjà le sang de mai ensemençait novembre

January 1982 •French

The essay by René Vautier, "Déjà le sang de Mai ensemençait Novembre", starts with the recapitulation of the representations of Algeria throughout the history of visual arts in France in an effort to explore the causes for the quest for independence.

Color-Blind

August 2019 •French

A synaesthetic portrait made between French Polynesia and Brittany, Color-blind follows the restless ghost of Gauguin in excavating the colonial legacy of a post-postcolonial present.

Algérie 1988-2000 : Autopsie d'une tragédie

September 2005 •French

Let Them All Go

January 2019 •French

February 22, 2019 marks the start of a historic movement in Algeria, initially against the candidacy of President Bouteflika for a fifth term, then for the departure of all former dignitaries of the regime and the establishment of a Second Republic. Algerian-Canadian filmmaker Sara Nacer returns to Algeria to capture this “Hirak” (movement in Arabic) through her camera. Through her journey, she invites us to discover the young generation who are leading the "Smile Revolution" and building Algeria 2.0, with a strong political, cultural and social awareness.

Hier, aujourd'hui et demain

November 2010 •Arabic

Cheikh El Hasnaoui, from the White House to the Blue Ocean

April 2014 •French

Cheikh El-Hasnaoui is an Algerian singer who left his country in 1937 without ever setting foot there again. Between 1939 and 1968 he composed most of his repertoire in France. For many years the Algerian cafes of Paris were the stages of his shows. With a handful of artists of his generation, he laid the foundations of modern Algerian song. A fervent defender of women's rights, he claims, as a pioneer, the fight for identity for a plural Algeria. At the end of the Sixties, he ended his artistic career. On July 6, 2002 he died in Saint-Pierre de la Réunion, where he is buried to this day. This 80-minute documentary follows in the footsteps of this extraordinary character. From Kabylia to Saint-Pierre de a Réunion via the Casbah of Algiers and the belly of Paris.

Dawn of the Damned

July 1965 •French

This excellent feature-length documentary - the story of the imperialist colonization of Africa - is a film about death. Its most shocking sequences derive from the captured French film archives in Algeria containing - unbelievably - masses of French-shot documentary footage of their tortures, massacres and executions of Algerians. The real death of children, passers-by, resistance fighters, one after the other, becomes unbearable. Rather than be blatant propaganda, the film convinces entirely by its visual evidence, constituting an object lesson for revolutionary cinema.

Algeria, Year Zero

October 1965 •French

Documentary on the beginnings of Algerian independence filmed during the summer of 1962 in Algiers. The film was banned in France and Algeria but won the Grand Prize at the Leipzig International Film Festival in 1965. Out of friendship, the production company Images de France sent an operator, Bruno Muel, who later declared: "For those who were called to Algeria (for me, 1956-58), participating in a film on independence was a victory over horror, lies and absurdity. It was also the beginning of my commitment to the cinema."

Amour de vivre

May 2010 •French

An account of the brief life of the writer Albert Camus (1913-1960), a Frenchman born in Algeria: his Spanish origin on the isle of Menorca, his childhood in Algiers, his literary career and his constant struggle against the pomposity of French bourgeois intellectuals, his communist commitment, his love for Spain and his opposition to the independence of Algeria, since it would cause the loss of his true home, his definitive estrangement.

Amal

October 1960 •French

A sublime documentary on childhood and bereavement that’s one of several shorts the filmmaker completed while working in Algeria for Georges Derocles’s company Les Studios Africa, for whom he would shortly make his breakthrough feature The Olive Trees of Justice.

Daniel Timsit, l’Algérien

January 2009 •French

René Vautier, le maquisard à la caméra

January 2000 •French