Most Viewed Keyword Maghreb

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

"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.

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.

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).

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?

Originally commissioned by the city of Algiers to promote tourism, Mohamed Zinet’s Tahia ya Didou blends documentary with fiction to create a poetic, acerbic and rapturous portrait of the director’s native city. The camera travels freely, through the port, market, streets and cafés, capturing everyday people, some of whom recur frequently enough to seem like protagonists. The nominal plotline follows a French tourist couple’s leisurely visit to the city, the man having previously served in the army during the Algerian war. As they walk around, his comments betray his mindset’s racist colonial prejudices, while his wife reiterates asinine clichés. Their unhurried wandering is interrupted when he comes across a blind man and realises that he tortured him during his army service. The film is punctuated with punchy sequences that show a poet named Momo delivering verse as an elegy for Algiers.

Belkacem, a young unemployed man living in the Saharan village of Boulhilet, is entrusted by Bouacha, an old dervish who came from nowhere, with the secret of the olive tree, the only lush tree and true mystery in this stone desert. After water supply works, modern life bursts into the village. Belkacem, ill-prepared for this situation, confuses dream and reality. Believing he has killed his rival who loves his beloved, he flees the village after donning the clothes of the dervish, whose gait he now imitates.

February 22, 2019 marks the start of a historic movement in Algeria, initially against the candidacy of President Bouteflika for a fifth term, then for the departure of all former dignitaries of the regime and the establishment of a Second Republic. Algerian-Canadian filmmaker Sara Nacer returns to Algeria to capture this “Hirak” (movement in Arabic) through her camera. Through her journey, she invites us to discover the young generation who are leading the "Smile Revolution" and building Algeria 2.0, with a strong political, cultural and social awareness.

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.

"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.

A modern couple seeks to find marital happiness in a context where Algerian society is taking the “first step” towards female emancipation. A woman becomes president of a popular municipal assembly. Will she find happiness ?

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 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.

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.

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...

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.

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".

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.