The Battle of Algiers

The Battle of Algiers 1966

7.90

Paratrooper commander Colonel Mathieu, a former French Resistance fighter during World War II, is sent to Algeria to reinforce efforts to squelch the uprisings of the Algerian War. There he faces Ali la Pointe, a former petty criminal who, as the leader of the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale, directs terror strategies against the colonial French government occupation. As each side resorts to ever-increasing brutality, no violent act is too unthinkable.

1966

The Charcoal Maker

The Charcoal Maker 1973

10.00

Film describes the miserable existence of a charcoal-burner who is barely able to feed his family. His search for work in town ends in failure and he is forced to return to his village.

1973

Lion of the Desert

Lion of the Desert 1981

7.30

Resistance leader Omar Mukhtar opposes Italian colonization before World War II. The brutal guerrilla war against Italian General Rodolfo Graziani and the Fascist forces of Benito Mussolini highlights the struggle for Libyan independence and the harsh tactics utilised by the colonisers.

1981

Our Algeria

Our Algeria 1959

10.00

"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.

1959

Forbidden Zone

Forbidden Zone 1974

10.00

A revolutionary militant is killed during the repression of May 1945. His son, who is unaware of the real circumstances of the murder, ends up being attached to the ideal for which his father died.

1974

Paroles d'un Prisonnier Français de l'ALN

Paroles d'un Prisonnier Français de l'ALN 2010

10.00

The image of French prisoners was very often evoked in Algerian cinema and literature, but until today, no Algerian or even European report or documentary had given voice to one of these French prisoners of the war of Algeria. In the interest of truth and writing history, we set out in search of one of these French witnesses. This witness is René Rouby, prisoner of Amirouche's group for more than 114 days in 1958 in the Akfadou region in Kabylia. This is the first testimony from a French prisoner of the ALN (the National Liberation Army).

2010

Hell Train

Hell Train 1985

4.80

Hell Train is a French film based on a true story. One evening at a ball in a small town, a fight breaks out in an atmosphere tinged with racism. Three of the ringleaders end up at the police station. The next day, November 14, 1983, on the Bordeaux-Ventimiglia train, the three men who were candidates for enlistment in the Foreign Legion beat Habib Grimzi, a 26-year-old Algerian, before throwing him out of a window. A young woman, who witnessed the murder, alerted the police. The investigation begins in a climate of extreme tension. In the city, provocations and attacks are increasing...

1985

The Last Queen

The Last Queen 2023

6.60

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

Chronicle of the Years of Fire

Chronicle of the Years of Fire 1975

6.40

A meticulous chronicle of the evolution of the Algerian national movement from 1939 until the outbreak of the revolution on November 1, 1954, the film unequivocally demonstrates that the "Algerian War" is not an accident of history, but a slow process of suffering and warlike revolts, uninterrupted, from the start of colonization in 1830, until this "Red All Saints' Day" of November 1, 1954. At its center, Ahmed gradually awakens to political awareness against colonization, under the gaze of his son, a symbol of the new Algeria, and that of Miloud, half-mad haranguer, half-prophet, incarnation of Popular memory of the revolt, the liberation of Algeria and its people.

1975

Yasmina

Yasmina 1961

10.00

"Yasmina" filmed in 1961 in the middle of the Algerian war tells the story of a little Algerian girl with her hen and her family whose father was killed in a bombing by the French colonial army of occupation. The family, after a long journey, heads towards the refugee camps on the Tunisian border. Produced by the Cinema Service of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA) in the midst of the war of independence, these films were intended to re-inform the population and international public opinion on the abuses committed by the French colonial army: torture, arrests and arbitrary executions, napalm bombings, fires in douars, entire villages wiped off the map, etc. which the French media described as a "pacification" campaign. The latter censoring or reorienting any images that could harm the colonial narrative.

1961

Lumières

Lumières 1989

10.00

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

Echebka (الشبكة)

Echebka (الشبكة) 1976

10.00

Maamar (Sid Ali Kouiret), a young fisherman working in a small port in western Algeria, is forced to sell his goods at a discount every day to Si Khelifa (Abdelhalim Rais), owner of many trucks and a cannery where the wives work fishermen. He has a strange encounter. As he returns from fishing, bassinet in hand, he witnesses a car accident. Indeed, a car hits a tree with a beautiful girl “Hayat” on board who has lost consciousness. Maamar pulls her out of the car and saves her. It is at this precise moment that he realizes the existence of another world. As if awakened from a long sleep, he realizes that this exploitation can no longer continue. He leaves his village and his wife Laâlia (Fatima Belhadj) on a whim for three years. He finds himself in the capital which he leaves to return to his village and carry out a saving action...

1976

Opium and the Stick

Opium and the Stick 1970

7.60

In 1950, in Algeria, in a village in Kabylia, Algerian resistance fighters resisted the French occupation army. Bachir returns to the village to escape the clashes ravaging Algiers. In Thala, he has two brothers, Ali and Belaïd. The first is engaged with the ALN (The National Liberation Army) and fights against the colonizer. His second brother, Belaïd, the eldest, is convinced of a French Algeria. His family torn apart, Bachir decides to join the war and takes sides against the repression of the French army. The French army is trying in vain to turn the population against the insurgents by using disinformation. The more time passes, the more the inhabitants of the village and surrounding areas, oppressed, rally to the cause of the FLN, their houses and their fields will be burned... Adaptation to the cinema of the eponymous novel Opium and the Stick, published in 1965, by Mouloud Mammeri, the film was dubbed into Tamazight (Berber), a first for Algerian cinema.

1970

Ommi Traki

Ommi Traki 1973

10.00

Ommi Traki is an elderly woman who is active and involved in everything, organizing everything in her family and neighborhood. Surrounding her are her husband Salah, who contentedly observes the results of his wife's interventions with a mocking air; her spoiled son Ali, a young man she still considers a child; the maid Zouzou; and others. The film is inspired by the famous Tunisian television series of the same name from the 1970s.

1973

The Other Shore

The Other Shore 1997

6.10

This film deals with the aftermath of the Algerian war of liberation. Georges Montero, an Algerian-born Frenchman, manages an olive canning factory in Oran. He travels to Paris for a cataract operation. Marinette, his sister, and Belka, his friend and a recent immigrant, want him to return to France permanently. Friction develops between the two friends as Georges is pressured to sell his factory. Friendship developed between Georges and his surgeon, who as a French Arab has severed ties with his culture and country of origin.

1997

Faithful

Faithful 2022

6.20

1956. Algeria is a French colony. Fernand and Helene are madly in love. Fernand is an activist, fighting for independence alongside the Algerians. Helene is fighting for Fernand’s life. History will irrevocably change the course of their destiny.

2022

Fadhma N'Soumer

Fadhma N'Soumer 2014

6.40

This film, is about the courage and the determination of a young woman in djurdjur"as mountain in Algeria, fighting for her ancestor land during the earlier years of french occupation.

2014

The Desert Ark

The Desert Ark 1998

6.70

The Desert Ark (L'Arche du Desert), a variation on Romeo and Juliet set in the Algerian desert. A young couple must face inevitable conflict when their rival families discover their secret love. Taking refuge in a cave, they listen to the sounds of a senseless campaign of violence and murder, which is the culmination of the extremism that has long divided their two communities. Nominated for the Golden Leopard at the 1997 Locarno Film Festival.

1998

La Mission

La Mission 1971

10.00

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

L'Algérie des chimères

L'Algérie des chimères 2001

6.00

Through the fictionalized lives of two young Saint-Simonians, this television film presents the history of French colonization in Algeria from 1837 to the end of the Second Empire.

2001

L’Incendie (El Harik)

L’Incendie (El Harik) 1974

10.00

In 1939 in eastern Algeria, Omar, a young boy of ten, lives with his family in a room in Dar Sbitar, a house shared by several families who overcome the trials they go through every day to ensure their subsistence. Her deceased father is Aïni, the mother, who bleeds herself from all four veins to keep her children and their grandmother alive. The families of Dar Sbitar share their intimacy and their daily life, this life animates the big house, which itself becomes a character in its own right. "El Harik" (The Fire), is an Algerian drama series in 10 episodes adapted from Mohamed Dib's trilogy "The Big House", "The Fire" and "The Loom".

1974

Raï Is Not Dead

Raï Is Not Dead 2023

10.00

What musical genre can claim to have gone, in the space of fifty years, from a hidden cabaret in Oran to Super Bowl halftime? Born in Algeria at the end of the Second World War, the raï wave spread from the cabarets of western Algeria to the cassette shops of Barbès in Paris, before sweeping the world at the end of the 1980s. its hybridization, the intoxicating music traveled from Algerian and French weddings to the biggest international stages, before suddenly disappearing from the radar at the dawn of the new millennium. Icons that have disappeared, including Cheikha Remitti and Prince Hasni, to young heirs, passing by the star Khaled, the collector Hadj Sameer trace the tumultuous course of this musical genre, between clandestinity, planetary glory and resistance.

2023