Southern Cross(1932)

Raï Story(ar)

A musical journey with stories of Rai music, starting with the Algerian city of Oran, where Rai music originated, the shift that Cheikha Rimitti made in Rai music and how it became known to the public, and the developments that followed.

Mimezrane(ar)

Da L'Mulud(fr)

An emblematic figure in the defense of Berber culture, Mouloud Mammeri (1917-1989) experienced numerous confrontations with the authorities in Algeria, including the suspension in 1973 of the teaching of Berber at university and the ban of the conference he was to deliver on March 10, 1980 at the University of Tizi Ouzou on ancient Kabyle poetry... which will be the detonator of the powerful and harshly repressed cultural demands movement of April 1980, also called the Berber Spring. Mouloud Mammeri is one of the "historians" of French-speaking Algerian literature from the middle of the last century who, through his pen, gave back the soul to a country by giving it back its voice.

Guerre aux images en Algérie(fr)

La parole est au témoin(fr)

Mustapha, a cab driver in Paris, charges a customer in a hurry, without realizing that he is in a hurry to escape his pursuers after robbing a jewelry store. The next day, reading the newspapers, Mustapha becomes aware of the role he has played in this affair, and would gladly assist the police if a fortuitous incident didn't make him fear the criminals' vengeance. It's a cruel dilemma in which he is both suspected by some and threatened by others. Weak but honest, he manages to get out of this predicament at the risk of his life!

Zinet, Algiers, Happiness(fr)

Who remembers Mohamed Zinet? In the eyes of French spectators who reserve his face and his frail silhouette, he is simply the “Arab actor” of French films of the 1970s, from Yves Boisset to Claude Lelouch. In Algeria, he's a completely different character... A child of the Casbah, he is the brilliant author of a film shot in the streets of Algiers in 1970, Tahya Ya Didou. Through this unique work, Zinet invents a new cinema, tells another story, shows the Algerians like never before. In the footsteps of his elder, in the alleys of the Casbah or on the port of Algiers, Mohammed Latrèche will retrace the story of Tahya Ya Didou and its director.

Enough!(ar)

Set amidst the civil war of Algeria in the 1990s, Enough! is the story of two women. Emel is a Westerner whose husband, a journalist, is missing - perhaps kidnapped or even killed for articles he's written.

Oranges Amères(fr)

Recognizing no boundaries to her love, Angele manages to foment riots, rages and tragedy in colonial Algeria. Angele, an Algerian colonist with impeccably French origins, has fallen in love with Said, the assistant in her brother-in-law's bakery shop. Said is conscious of his Arab origins and traditions, and Angele has her work cut out for her if she wants to persuade him to marry her. Once she does, all hell breaks loose, as neither her European-origin peers nor Said's conservative Arab family approve of the union. When word of the proposed marriage gets out, strikes, violence and murder quickly follow, ruining not only Angele's life, but the lives of those around her. Her brother-in-law Paco, meanwhile, has been doggedly trying to get along and raise his family in an increasingly chaotic and difficult situation.

L'autre France(fr)

Social drama about Algerian immigrant workers who came searching for work in France.

The Battle of Algiers(it)

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.

Algérie Couleurs(xx)

"Film shot on the 'bench' from hundreds of photos, buildings, streets, towns unusually colorful for a North Mediterranean eye. The editing was composed on a score because the shots are generally very short, up to two images, and they do not follow each other "cut" or crossed but in "racket". The progression of shots varies from faintly colored recognizable to strongly colored unrecognizable. The soundtrack is composed of Arabic music that gradually turns into free-jazz. » Mannheim Festival, 1973

Where Fig Trees Grow(fr)

An ensemble piece set in a North African neighbourhood in Toulon.

Heart of the Casbah(fr)

Maria-Pilar is the new wife of an Algerian gangster whom the police have just arrested. The son of a first marriage arrives in Algiers from which he has remained far away for a long time. His stepmother, charmed by the teenager, gradually experiences a devouring passion, against which Michel tries in vain to fight: he loves a young girl, Sylvie. Mad with jealousy, his stepmother singles him out for his father's vengeance by distorting the truth. Michel does not escape his father's fury, but when the woman's deception becomes known, Maria-Pilar is strangled to death.

The Seventh Door(fr)

An old man about to die gives all his fortune to a young beggar he meets in an Arabian town. He takes him to his house (now the poor man's property) and he strongly advises him not to open one of the doors, the seventh door. "I could throw the key into the sea" says the young lad" No use, you'd dive to get it back". The young man is curious and he cannot resist temptation: he opens the forbidden door. A strange world is waiting for him where a girl, Leila, will be his guide .

Algérie 1954, la révolte d'un colonisé(fr)

Noua(ar)

Directed by Abdelaziz Tolbi.

The Zerda and the Songs of Forgetting(fr)

“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.

The Panafrican Festival in Algiers(ar)

Festival panafricain d'Alger is a documentary by William Klein of the music and dance festival held 40 years ago in the streets and in venues all across Algiers. Klein follows the preparations, the rehearsals, the concerts… He blends images of interviews made to writers and advocates of the freedom movements with stock images, thus allowing him to touch on such matters as colonialism, neocolonialism, colonial exploitation, the struggles and battles of the revolutionary movements for Independence.

China Is Still Far(ar)

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.

The Harem of Madame Osmane(fr)

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.