27 years after 1962, Antoine returns to Algiers...
Social & External
The people behind it
Michel Such
Mustapha El Anka
Aziz Degga
Fawzi B. Saichi
Osmane Bechikh
In Algiers in 1993, while the civil war is starting, Mrs Osmane's tenants have to endure her bad temper. Her husband left her and the fear to lose her respectability haunt her. The former member of the Resistance during the Independence War persists in controlling the slightest moves of the households rather than struggle against her own frustrations. Learning her daughter is in love, the possibility of finding herself alone will push her to the limit: The symbolical Mrs Osmane "harem" is about to collapse.
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.
Algerian youth of the 1960s, straddling traditional South Mediterranean and Western culture and the desire for emancipation of younger generations to find true love.
Directed by Kamal Dehane
As a boy, Raoul is reared by an Arab tribe in Algerian Sahara. Years later, as a refined Europeanized gentleman, he falls in love with Barbara, an officer's daughter, who rejects him when she discovers his background. Affecting a raid, he captures her and then secretly buys her at a slave auction. When she is rescued by French troops, however, his ancestry is established and they find happiness together.
1953, colonized Algeria. Fanon, a young black psychiatrist is appointed head doctor at the Blida-Joinville Hospital. He was putting his theories of ‘Institutional Psychotherapy’ into practice in opposition to the racist theories of the Algies School of Psychiatry, while a war broke out in his own wards.
Djamila, a young Algerian woman living with her brother Hadi and her uncle Mustafa in the Casbah district of Algiers under the French occupation of Algeria, sees the full extent of injustice, tyranny and cruelty on his compatriots by French soldiers. Jamila's nationalist spirit will be strengthened when French forces invade her university to arrest her classmate Amina who commits suicide by ingesting poison. Shortly after the prominent Algerian guerrilla leader Youssef takes refuge with her, she realizes that her uncle Mustafa is part of this network of anti-colonial rebel fighters. Her uncle linked her to the National Liberation Front (FLN). A series of events illustrate Jamila's participation in resistance operations against the occupier before she was finally captured and tortured. Finally, despite the efforts of her French lawyer, Jamila is sentenced to death...
In the midst of the Algerian war for independence, a group of fighters is trapped in the mountains, surrounded by the colonial army. Cut off from their allies, they have only one hope: to transmit a vital message to save their unit. But crossing enemy lines is a suicide mission. Their only chance lies with an unexpected messenger: a courageous dog named Messaoud. Carrying the letter attached to his collar, he embarks on a perilous crossing, braving the hostile nature and the dangers of war. But when he is captured by the enemy, his courage and instinct become his only weapons. Prisoner, hunted, he must risk everything to escape and accomplish his mission before it is too late. Sacrifice, bravery and hope mingle in this breathtaking odyssey where the humblest of heroes can change the course of history. The Unknown Hero, a moving film which won first prize at the Arab World Festival in 2017.
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.
Set in the 1800s among the Berbers of North Africa, this 1997 Algerian feature concerns a noble widow who receives a customary purse of gold coins from the enemy tribe that murdered her husband; the gift puts her in conflict with her kinsmen, who want the money to buy back land taken by the enemy in cahoots with French colonials.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, two friends, Mokrane and Menach, abruptly interrupt their studies and return to their remote native Kabylian village of Tagsa. While waiting to be drafted into the French Army they have time to woo. Mokrane falls for beautiful Aazi and soon marries her only to find out that she can bear no child. Menach, on his part, is stongly attracted to Davda, but the latter is already married to a rich merchant...Happiness does not seem to be in store for the two former students...
In Kabylie, rude mountain region in the north of Algeria. Arezki finds the young Larbi exhausted, buried under the snow. He takes him in and nurses him until he's recovered. The host seduces Arezki's daughter. She is pregnant. This is an unsupportable shame to the father of the female sinner. Arezki claims vengeance. He leaves his house and takes the oath not to come back before having killed Larbi who betrayed him under his own roof.
Pépé le Moko, one of France's most wanted criminals, hides out in the Casbah section of Algiers. He knows police will be waiting for him if he tries to leave the city. When Pépé meets Gaby, a gorgeous woman from Paris who is lost in the Casbah, he falls for her.
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.
In prison in colonial Algeria, shortly after the end of the Second World War, three indigenous cellmates make out. Once free, they attack the authority represented by the triad of the boss, the gendarme and the administrator. “Living the colonial condition,” confided Tewfik Farès, “is something! It’s not sociologically or historically speaking. It’s life. And I think that’s all there in it. [...] For a hundred and thirty years, we wait. We hold back. We push back. We hope. At the same time, on different occasions, there are skirmishes, unrest.
In 1971, the Algerian government nationalized hydrocarbons. The consequences of this decision on the community of Algerians in France are numerous. The Galti family is prey to these economic problems. The father, Khaled, former member of the F.L.N. in France, does not escape the sentence. Sharazade, his wife and comrade in combat, finds herself torn between her role as wife, mother and nostalgia for a country and a bygone past. As for his son Karim, a victim of socio-cultural division, all he has left is refusal.
In Algeria in 1954, in a village in the Aurès region, poverty reigns over peasants enslaved by colonial administrators and Algerian landowners. Noua, in love with the son of a peasant dispossessed of his land, must be sold to a wealthy landowner.
Néfissa, a student in Algiers, returns to her village in the south in the summer. Her father wants her to marry the mayor but she wants to continue her studies. Confronting her father and the opinion of the villagers who do not understand her, she decides to flee to Algiers. The shepherd Rabah discovering her wounded and lost in the mountains, has her treated by her mother. In contact with Nefissa, Rabat becomes aware of his exploited condition and discovers the possibilities offered to him by the cooperatives of the agrarian revolution. The two young people will go through the decisive stage together which will allow them to escape obscurantism and exploitation. Based on the novel "Le vent du sud" by Abdelhamid Benahouga
Fous de Musique by Jean-Charles Carlus (1957) is a musical comedy featuring Rouiched, Mahieddine Bentir and the famous Bendaoud orchestra. Shot during the Algerian War, the film was not released until after independence and was probably shown in Paris in cinemas intended for immigrant workers around 1967. Sources: Archives Numériques du Cinéma Algérien
Two young girls meet, Reinette from the countryside and Mirabelle from Paris, and decide to take a flat together in Paris where they attend University. Four successive stories about their daily lives illustrate the very different views, characters and relation to the world of these two friends.
Selma, a psychoanalyst, deals with a cast of colorful new patients after returning home to Tunisia to open a practice.
Paris 1930. Paul has only ever had one and the same horizon: the high walls of the orphanage, an austere building in the Parisian working class suburbs. Entrusted to a joyful country woman, Célestine, and her husband, Borel, the rather stiff gamekeeper of a vast estate in Sologne, the city child, recalcitrant and stubborn, arrives in a mysterious and disturbing world, that of a sovereign and wild region. The huge forest, misty ponds, heaths, and fields all belong to the Count de la Fresnaye, an elderly taciturn man who lives alone in his manor.
The mayor of Lyon, Paul Théraneau, is in a delicate position. After 30 years in politics, he is running out of ideas and is faced with a feeling of existential emptiness. To overcome this, Paul hires a young and brilliant philosopher, Alice Heimann. Then follows a dialogue between two diametrically opposed personalities who will turn their certainties upside down.
When 43-year-old hairdresser Suze Trappet finds out that she's seriously ill, she decides to go looking for a child she was forced to abandon when she was only 15. On her madcap bureaucratic quest she crosses paths with JB, a 50-year-old man in the middle of a burnout, and Mr. Blin, a blind archivist prone to overenthusiasm. The unlikely trio set off on a hilarious and poignant helterskelter journey across the city in search of Suze's long-lost child.
After leaving France in search of a better life in America, a television producer returns with a group of burlesque dancers to take the Paris club scene by storm.
Etienne, an often out of work but endearing actor, runs a theater workshop in a prison, where he brings together an unlikely troupe of prisoners to stage Samuel Beckett’s famous play Waiting for Godot. When he is allowed to take the colorful band of convicts on a tour outside of prison, Etienne finally has the chance to thrive.
A widowed professor living in Paris develops a special relationship with a younger French woman.
A wheelchair-bound singer and her best friend embark on a roadtrip to Memphis.
When she arrived at the Elysée Palace, Bernadette Chirac expected to finally get the place she deserved, she who had always worked in the shadow of her husband to make him president. Put aside because she was considered too old-fashioned, Bernadette decided to take her revenge by becoming a major media figure.
A woman in her thirties gets tired of life in Paris and decides to leave and become a farmer.
A man takes his wife and their teenage children on a road trip down memory lane while facing divorce.
A single father, Étienne, is preparing for his daughter Rosa to leave home, but his life is upended when he sees his long-lost wife, Valérie, on TV, forcing a confrontation with the past.
In the fifties, young Alice leaves her natal Swiss mountains for the sunny and vibrant shores of Beirut. She falls madly in love with Joseph, a quirky astrophysicist intent on sending the first Lebanese national into space. Alice quickly fits in among his relatives, but after years of bliss, the civil war threatens their Garden of Eden.
From the Atlantic to the Black Sea, Mathias and Philippe, two old friends, embark on a bicycle journey that Mathias’s son made before his tragic death. The two men ride through the ordeals with tenderness, humor and emotion.
Marie-Line is juggling between odd jobs to support her agoraphobic father. Despite the precariousness of their lifestyle, she remains a lively and cheerful young woman. Yet, after a series of unfortunate events, she is fired from her job and sentenced by a judge to a small penalty. A few days later, this very judge will be in a position to help her get back on track – a chance for Marie-Line but also the beginning of an unlikely friendship.
Five old friends decide to move in together as an alternative to living in a retirement home. Joining them is an ethnology student whose thesis is on the aging population.
Renn Wheeland returns home to Cleveland for his mother's funeral. Once there, he forges new relationships while healing old ones, before confronting his problems and trying to face his grief.
Pierre, a successful 33-year-old florist, has his life turned upside down by the sudden arrival of his mother Judith, whom he hasn’t seen for two years. Mercurial and extravagant, she suffers from bipolar disorder and has recently escaped from a clinic. Pierre has only one idea in mind: bring her back as quickly as possible so his life can get back on track. But nothing happens as he hoped for. Their unexpected reunion, as funny and explosive as it is heart-wrenching, will transform Pierre and Judith forever.
In 35,000 BC, the tribe of the Dirty Hairs is at war against the tribe of the Clean Hairs for eight hundred years, trying to get their shampoo. The chief of the Dirty Hairs sends his daughter Guy disguised to the enemy tribe to get some shampoo for his tribe. When the healer of the Clean Hairs tribe surprisingly kills two cavemen of his tribe, their imbecile chief assigns Pierre with curled hair and Pierre blonde to investigate the murder and find the criminal.
