
27 Feb 1987

Herzschlag der Kontinente
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It is with the architect Jean-Jacques Deluz, that we visit Algiers, "his city" since 1960 and that he left only two years during the worst moments of terrorism. From the Casbah, in the 19th century center, including the cities of Fernand Pouillon and Bab El Oued to arrive at the new city of Maelma which he built today. Tender look, but without concessions at the same time architectural promenade and meetings with actors of art and culture: Djamel Allam, the singer Kabyle, Djamel Amrani, the poet, friend of Jean Sennac, Mohamed Ben Gettaf, Dramaturge and director of the theater of Algiers, Souad Delmi-Bourras, young designer Boudjemàa Kareche, director of the Algerian cinema, Amine Kouider, conductor, who relaunches the opera in Algeria, the painter Malek Salah, and others. A look at Algeria and the Algerians, far from the clichés of certain media, the bias being to seek signs of hope rather than "blood and tears".

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27 Feb 1987

No overview found

24 Mar 2024

1962, at the end of the Algerian War, Algerian independence activists are released from Rennes prison. For one night, filmmaker Yann Le Masson films them. They tell him their vision for the future of Algeria and the place women must occupy in the new society to be built. Fifty years later, with the soundtrack missing, Raphaël Pillosio sets out to find these women. Two deaf people set about lip-reading the women filmed by Yann Le Masson, revealing snatches of sentences, words cut short by the camera's shifts. An investigative film in which the few activists still alive discover their old testimonies and tell us their silent story. The reconstruction of the lost soundtrack will remain in suspense; no happy ending will come to absorb the absence, to cancel the ferocious operation of time. An essay film about cinema that depicts their disappearance, and forever keeps them alive.

15 Oct 2022

Paying tribute to some of America's only surviving drive-ins – and those who keep them running – this heartfelt documentary captures efforts to preserve these nostalgic theaters in small-towns across the country.

01 Jan 2018

Cheikh Djemaï looks back on the genesis of Gillo Pontecorvo’s feature film, The Battle of Algiers (1965). Through archive images, extracts from the film and interviews with personalities, the filmmaker retraces the journey of a major work - from the events of the Algiers Casbah (1956-1957) to the presentation of the Lion of 'Or causing the anger of the French delegation in Venice - which left its mark as much in the history of cinema as in that of Algeria.

24 Aug 2017

Between 1954-1962, one hundred to three hundred young French people refused to participate in the Algerian war. These rebels, soldiers or conscripts were non-violent or anti-colonialists. Some took refuge in Switzerland where Swiss citizens came to their aid, while in France they were condemned as traitors to the country. In 1962, a few months after Independence, Villi Hermann went to a region devastated by war near the Algerian-Moroccan border, to help rebuild a school. In 2016 he returned to Algeria and reunited with his former students. He also met French refractories, now living in France or Switzerland.

09 Dec 2019

He is a 75-year-old half-blind man. He takes 3000 steps every day. Since 2004 he has made a decision: he will no longer talk about cinema. Boudjemâa, our living memory. That of Algerian cinema, African cinema, Arab cinema, cinema in short. The Algiers Cinematheque. The “masterpiece of Algerian cinema”. Boudjemâa Karèche directed it for 34 years. So why does Boudjemâa no longer talk about cinema? The answer lies next to the circumstances which caused his ouster from the Cinémathèque. Boudjemâa was silent. The time has come for him to let the word think for itself.

15 Jan 2025

In 1994, at over seventy years old, Gilberte and William Sportisse, threatened by the FIS, arrived from Algeria. Of Jewish faith, he of Arabic mother tongue, they formed a fighting couple, started for the independence of Algeria, always with an unshakeable faith in humanity. They enjoy recounting the participation of Algerian Jews in the Second World War and the struggle for Algerian independence. They provide us with previously unpublished information on the public and clandestine struggles of the Algerian Communist Party before and after independence, and on the repression of activists who, like William and Gilberte Sportisse, were tortured and imprisoned after Colonel Boumédiène came to power. The film is an ode to understanding between people of different origins or cultures and a tribute to a couple whose youthful character and enthusiasm still astonish.

01 Jan 2010

Habiba Djahnine went to meet activists who continue to take action. To meet them, to capture them in the spaces where they live, work or fight. They inscribe a few words of our tormented history. Memory, memory gaps, background noise, demonstrations... The film bears witness to 20 years of political mobilization/repression in Algeria.

01 Jan 2001

Immigrated to the Paris region since 1964, Kader decides to spend the summer holidays with his family in his native village, not far from Algiers. These few weeks, so eagerly awaited by both sides, constitute a special moment full of strong emotions. The camera follows the family in their meetings, their reunions, their difficulties, their visions of the country and its region, the celebrations, the weddings, their return to France… This film raises many questions. Within this family itself, between those who stayed in the country and those who emigrated to France, how do we perceive the situation in Algeria? What hopes do each of them have for their country? What about the Franco-Algerian relationship? Contemporary immigration? The desire for exile of Algerians today? Different discourses on both sides of the Mediterranean? The desires of each of them…

14 Oct 2023

Pierre Clément, student and photographer of René Vauthier, first accompanied him to Tunisia to make a film on the country's independence in 1957. Destiny led him to Algeria and his presence in February 1958 at the Tunisian-Algerian border changed his life. . Forever. He took his camera and photographed the attacks on Sakia Sidi Youssef before committing himself body and soul to the Algerian cause. Shortly after, he directed the film “Algerian Refugees” before being arrested, tortured and imprisoned, while his third film, “The National Liberation Army in Almaki”, was not finished. Abdel Nour Zahzah, a director who commemorates Pierre Clément, the director who risked his life, the brother of the Algerian resistance, who disappeared in 2007.

01 Jan 1961

This docu-fiction recounts the difficulties overcome by an ALN detachment whose perilous mission is to transport weapons and ammunition from Tunisia across the Algerian Sahara during the Algerian liberation war (1954-1962) against the French army of occupation.
01 Jan 2018
Achour is thirty. Night and day, he walks. Rebellious soul, he crisscrosses Alger and its neighborhoods, stays at friends' houses and often leaves the city to meet the nearby montain in Kabylia, his alter-ego. In this environment, marked by war and terrorism, his resistance continues, mobile and ascending. Algerian hardcore-punk musician, Achour once screamed his anger against the country's regime and sang "Anarchytecture". But the movement died down, friends went their separate ways. His Facebook wall became his notebook, his window open to the world. It represents a scream aimed towards the echo of the mountains, between virtual wall, infinite facades of large complexes and the strata of mineral cliffs. A scream comes back at us.

15 Mar 2017

Blood Road follows the journey of ultra-endurance mountain bike athlete Rebecca Rusch and her Vietnamese riding partner, Huyen Nguyen, as they pedal 1,200 miles along the infamous Ho Chi Minh Trail through the dense jungles of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Their goal: to reach the site where Rebecca’s father, a U.S. Air Force pilot, was shot down in Laos more than 40 years earlier.

31 May 1979

TSR documentary on the 1979 expedition to Algeria in the Atakor massif (Hoggar desert), organized by Geneva mountaineer Michel Vaucher and Jean-Blaise Fellay. The climbers make a dozen ascents including the famous summit of Adaouda (which means "finger" in Tamasheq, the Tuareg dialect), by several routes. Then a new route on the peaks of the southern Tezoulegs. They discover the volcanic geological characteristics of the Atakor massif and meet the nomadic inhabitants of the region, the Tuaregs, who are increasingly settling in the town of Tamanrasset.

01 Jan 1966

In February 1966, Pierre Mazeaud and Lucien Berardini traveled to the Atakor massif, in the Hoggar mountain range of the Sahara in southern Algeria. There, they attempted a challenging first ascent: the Takouba spur, one of the peaks adjacent to Garet El Djenoun, a legendary mountain in the Hoggar massif, first climbed by Roger Frison-Roche and Raymond Coche in 1935. The documentary, superbly filmed by Jacques Ertaud, won the Grand Prize at the Trento International Mountain Film Festival in 1966.

01 Jan 2006

The Algerian Sahara is the most exceptional deserts. He densifies everything he hosts, men and nature, and invites you to pay attention to the world. Jean-Louis and Odette Bernezat were born at the foot of the Alps, but it was in the Sahara that they found their way, and devoted almost forty years to the discovery of this environment and have extraordinary knowledge to share. Director Maryse Bergonzat accompanies them, in a meha, in the Hoggar in Algeria, with their Tuareg friends. A privileged place to appreciate the desert, its landscapes, its inhabitants, its laws and its stories, in the company of exceptional guides.

27 Feb 1983

“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.

01 Jan 1967

In 1967, Visconti came to Algiers for the filming of The Stranger with Mastroianni and Anna Karina. Camus, during his lifetime, had always refused to allow one of his novels to be brought to the screen. His family made another decision. The filming of the film was experienced in Algiers, like a posthumous return of the writer to Algiers. During filming, a young filmmaker specializing in documentaries Gérard Patris attempts a report on the impact of the filming of The Stranger on the Algerians. Interspersed with sequences from the shooting of Visconti's film, he films Poncet, Maisonseul, Bénisti and Sénac, friends of Camus, in full discussions to situate Camus and his work in a sociological and historical context. “The idea is for us to show people, others, ourselves as if they could all be Meursault, or at least the witnesses concerned to his drama.”

01 Aug 2004

This 17-minute documentary is featured on the 3-Disc Criterion Collection DVD of The Battle of Algiers (1966), released in 2004. An in-depth look at the Battle of Algiers through the eyes of five established and accomplished filmmakers; Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh, Oliver Stone, Julian Schnabel and Mira Nair. They discuss how the shots, cinematography, set design, sound and editing directly influenced their own work and how the film's sequences look incredibly realistic, despite the claim that everything in the film was staged .

05 Jul 1965

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.