Documentary / History
This film presents the point of view of an Arab from Algeria who rebels against colonization. He analyzes the process of awareness, the transition to revolt, to armed insurrection. Algeria and the settlers are seen through this lens and not the way a Frenchman saw the country.…


Narrator
Narrator

In the 1980s, young people of North African descent born in France and a priest from the Lyon suburbs organized the "March of the Beurs." Launched on October 15, 1983, by seventeen people from the La Cayolle neighborhood in Marseille following a racist crime, the march concluded two months later—on December 3—on the streets of Paris, with 100,000 participants. This movement demanded equal rights. Was their cry heard?

Following in the footsteps of Frison Roche, 7 climbers explore the main Hoggar massifs in Algeria. Their main objective is the ascent of the Garet El Djenoun summit via the north ridge, a long climb symbolic of a certain difficulty and a significant commitment, due to its location in the desert. They also attempt the Diedre Agresti, a daring route from the 70s, opened in around ten days on artificial, and unequipped; it is a path that has never been repeated; the objective is to do it free and almost only on wedges, with difficulties up to 7b/c in a sometimes very delicate rock... Excerpts from the film shot in 1970 by Henri Agresti on this same route, allow us to compare the technical and material means of the time to those of today. They also discover the beauty of the Algerian desert, its silence, its rock paintings, the customs of the Tuaregs, etc... a fascinating journey.

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...

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.

After reading the book "Guide to Hoggar Climbing," guide Pierre Agresti and his wife Isabelle Agresti set off into the Hoggar massif in the Algerian Sahara and tackled the west face of Garet El Djenoun. After a first attempt in 1967, they successfully reached the summit in 1970 and, with an old camera, made a film that remained unused for 25 years. In 1996, they decided to bring the past back to life through the ascent and encounters with the Tuaregs in the rock salt mines of Amadror. The film was shown in competition at the Trento Film Festival in 1997.

“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 Tank and The Olive Tree recalls a certain number of forgotten fundamentals and sheds new light on the history of Palestine. By combining geopolitical analysis, interviews with international personalities who are experts on the subject and testimonies from Palestinian and French citizens, this documentary offers the keys to understanding what the media call the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Enough to rid people's minds of clichés and prejudices! If The Chariot and the Olivier is intended to be educational, it speaks above all of a magnificent territory, and of a people who constantly affirm that “to live is already to resist”...

Agnieszka Lukasiak travels to Algeria to capture it's conflict on camera. When she arrives, she's immediately sidetracked by romance with her host, Habib. She turns the camera on herself as she falls in love with him. the atmosphere quickly diminishes when Habib's family steps in and kicks her out. Not to be deterred, on her second visite to Algeria to seek Habib's love, she begins her real journey to expose the underside of the country.