Traps

The year is 1950 and an English couple, Louise and Michael, have arrived in French-occupied Indochina to cover a story on a French-owned rubber plantation. They are to be the guests of the enigmatic plantation overseer, Daniel, and his beautiful yet difficult daughter Viola, at their elegant, decaying villa amid a tropical jungle. Michael and Louise hope that some time spent working in an exotic location will help reignite the passion in their floundering marriage. Instead they become unwittingly involved in the personal, sexual and political tensions of their hosts. Daniel is desperate to hold onto a way of life no longer possible in a country struggling for independence, bringing him into conflict with not only his daughter but also with his adopted country.

L'Ennemi intime

A drama following a French platoon during Algeria's war of independence.

Algérie en flammes

These are the first images shot in the ALN maquis, camera in hand, at the end of 1956 and in 1957. These war images taken in the Aurès-Nementchas are intended to be the basis of a dialogue between French and Algerians for peace in Algeria, by demonstrating the existence of an armed organization close to the people. Three versions of Algeria in Flames are produced: French, German and Arabic. From the end of the editing, the film circulates without any cuts throughout the world, except in France where the first screening takes place in the occupied Sorbonne in 1968. Certain images of the film have circulated and are found in films, in particular Algerian films. Because of the excitement caused by this film, he was forced to go into hiding for 25 months. After the declaration of independence, he founded the first Algerian Audiovisual Center.

La Zerda ou les chants de l'oubli

“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.

L'Instinct de mort

Jacques Mesrine, a loyal son and dedicated soldier, is back home and living with his parents after serving in the Algerian War. Soon he is seduced by the neon glamour of sixties Paris and the easy money it presents. Mentored by Guido, Mesrine turns his back on middle class law-abiding and soon moves swiftly up the criminal ladder.

L'Île rouge

Madagascar, at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. On an air base of the French army, the soldiers live the last carefree years of colonialism. Influenced by his readings of Fantômette, Thomas, a child who is not yet 10 years old, gradually forges a look at the world around him.

Les Roseaux sauvages

As the Algerian War draws to a close, a teenager with a girlfriend starts feeling homosexual urges for two of his classmates: a country boy, and a French-Algerian intellectual.

L'Aube des Damnés

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.

ميلة (Djamilah)

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...

La loi de mon pays

Algeria. Benjamin, Kateb and Antoine are three teenagers from three religious backgrounds who never should have met. But they share the same passion for football and the same disregard for the disapproving looks which their unusual friendship draws.

Les Bienheureux

Algiers, a few years after the civil war. Amal and Samir have decided to celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary in a restaurant. While on their way, their share their views on Algeria: Amal talks about lost illusions and Samir about the necessity to cope with them. At the same time, their son Fahim and his friends Feriel and Reda are wandering about in a hostile Algiers about to steal their youth.

Avoir 20 ans dans les Aurès

A group of refractory and pacifist Bretons is sent to Algeria. These beings confronted with the horrors of war gradually become killing machines. One of them did not accept it and deserted, taking with him an FLN prisoner who was to be executed the next day. International Critics Prize at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival. Copy restored in 2012

Fanon

Frantz Fanon, a French psychiatrist from Martinique, has just been appointed head of department at the psychiatric hospital in Blida, Algeria. His methods contrast with those of the other doctors in a context of colonization. A biopic in the heart of the Algerian war where a fight is waged in the name of Humanity.

Papillon

A man befriends a fellow criminal as the two of them begin serving their sentence on a dreadful prison island, which inspires the man to plot his escape.

Kaddour à Paris

Indochine

Set in colonial French Indochina during the 1930s to 1950s, this is the story of Éliane Devries, a French plantation owner, and of her adopted Vietnamese daughter, Camille, set against the backdrop of the rising Vietnamese nationalist movement.

Le harem de Mme Osmane

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.

Les Mains Libres

In 1964, Algeria, just two years after the end of the war of independence, found itself catapulted into new contradictions, a still rural territory which responded to the modernity brought by the revolution. Filmed during the winter of 1964-1965 by the young director Ennio Lorenzini, it is the first international Algerian production which paints a rare portrait in color of a multifaceted nation, far from the simplistic vision created by the press and the French army. Produced by Casbah Film, Les Mains Libres (initially titled Tronc De Figuier) bears witness to the stigmata of colonization and the future of free Algeria throughout the Algerian territory and reveals the richness of its landscapes and the diversity of its traditions . The documentary, using the aesthetics of militant cinema of the time, is made up of four scenes: Sea and Desert, The Struggle, The Earth, Freedom.

Chirurgien dans la guerre d'Algérie

Has everything really been said about the Algerian war? Although the archives are opening up, almost fifty years after the signing of the Evian Agreements (March 18, 1962), direct witnesses are beginning to disappear. They are, however, unique bearers of history, often the only ones able to illustrate the harsh reality of a long-hidden period. Gérard Zwang, surgeon of the contingent between May 1956 and June 1958, is one of these essential witnesses who help us discover an original history of the Algerian War. During his service, in charge of treating the most atrocious wounds of his fellow soldiers, he sees the war from the side of its victims. He did not fight with a machine pistol in his hand, but behind the closed doors of an operating room where life gives way to death in a matter of seconds.

Ah Faham - الفحام

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.