Dawn of the Damned

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.

1965-07-05 | fr

The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel

The life and career of Erwin Rommel and his involvement in the plot to assassinate Hitler.

1951-10-16 | en

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

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.

2014-04-10 | fr

Archie Shepp chez les Touaregs

1969-01-01 | ar

La Mission

An Algerian peasant (fellah), crushed by the soldiers of the French colonial army, decides to resist. His young wife finds herself, despite herself, also enlisted in the Algerian resistance to flee the atrocities of harsh colonial persecution.

1971-01-02 | ar

Procrastination

2011-04-01 | ar

C'Est Pour Demain

1961-01-02 | fr

Les Enfants de Novembre

In the streets of the Casbah of Algiers, an FLN fighter pursued by the colonial police hands over confidential documents to Mourad, an Algerian child shouting newspapers who must at all costs pass them on to the resistance. But the police are on their trail and will do anything to get them back.

1975-01-02 | ar

The Last Queen

1516, Legend has it that the king of Algiers had a wife named Zaphira. When the pirate Aroudj Barbarossa arrives to liberate the city from the Spaniards, he is determined to conquer Zaphira as well as the kingdom itself. But is Zaphira willing to let him, or is she plotting for herself?

2023-04-19 | ar

Douar de Femmes

At a dangerous time in Algeria, 'Douar de Femmes' is a story of ordinary women who manage to defend themselves in extraordinary situations. The film focuses on a small village that has been attacked more often by terrorists from the surrounding mountains. While the men work, the women learn how to handle machine guns and explore the area. “Fear has armed us,” says the young woman Sabrina. But despite that fear, people get married, children come and keep watch.

2005-11-17 | ar

Lejyon Dönüşü

1957-11-25 | tr

The Battle of Algiers

Tracing the struggle of the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale to gain freedom from French colonial rule as seen through the eyes of Ali from his start as a petty thief to his rise to prominence in the organisation and capture by the French in 1957. The film traces the rebels' struggle and the increasingly extreme measures taken by the French government to quell the revolt.

1966-09-08 | it

Noua

Directed by Abdelaziz Tolbi.

1972-01-02 | ar

The Zerda and the Songs of Forgetting

“La Zerda and the songs of oblivion” (1982) is one of only two films made by the Algerian novelist Assia Djebar, with “La Nouba des femmes du mont Chenoua” (1977). Powerful poetic essay based on archives, in which Assia Djebar – in collaboration with the poet Malek Alloula and the composer Ahmed Essyad – deconstructs the French colonial propaganda of the Pathé-Gaumont newsreels from 1912 to 1942, to reveal the signs of revolt among the subjugated North African population. Through the reassembly of these propaganda images, Djebar recovers the history of the Zerda ceremonies, suggesting that the power and mysticism of this tradition were obliterated and erased by the predatory voyeurism of the colonial gaze. This very gaze is thus subverted and a hidden tradition of resistance and struggle is revealed, against any exoticizing and orientalist temptation.

1983-02-27 | fr

Lumières

Long quest for a director specializing in commissioned films, who after a depression rediscovers his loved ones, his Casbah district, himself. Taken in hand, for a while, by his Islamist neighbor, it is above all the meeting with an old projectionist giving him a censored history of cinema and Algeria, which helps him to change, and to accept his own fantasies, embodied by Marilyn Monroe and the Andalusian.

1989-01-01 | ar

Barrières

Tahar, son of a wealthy family, is trying to preserve his privileged status despite the social changes brought about by the revolution. Tinted with historical symbolism, the film tells of the disaggregation of a feudal family when the father died.

1977-01-01 | ar

Amal

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.

1960-10-10 | fr

Beau Geste

In 1906, two American brothers join the French Foreign Legion and, led by a sadistic Sergeant-Major, they defend a fort against Berber and Tuareg attack.

1966-09-02 | en

Arezki, l'indigène

In 1895, young journalist Albertine Auclair arrives in the Kabylie during a family visit. The beauty of the region seduces her but she soon learns of the struggles of the native Algerians. She hears in particular about Arezki El Bachir, who was recently sentenced to death by the colonial justice system, and decides to find out more about this extraordinary man.

2008-10-01 | fr

Kamel Hamadi, Ger Yenzizen

Portrait of the Algerian singer and composer Kamal Hamadi (husband of the singer Noura). Performer, musician, conductor, lyricist, author and composer, he is considered today as the witness par excellence of Algerian artistic action of the 20th century. The film received the Golden Olivier for best documentary 2010 at the Tizi-Ouzou Amazigh Film Festival in Algeria.

2010-01-01 | ar