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.
Freddy Buache, André Gazut, Diego Masson, Nils Andersson, Jacques Baynac, Anita Bernard, André Bernard, Claude Garino, Jean-Claude Girardin, Claude Glayman, Lillis Kielland, Pierre Leray

For decades, the countries of the African Sahel region have been targets of colonialism and exploitation by France and other Western powers. This documentary addresses the popular resistance and new paths of development forged by Burkina Faso, Niger, and Mali after experiencing civil and military uprisings in recent years. The film explores the popular resistance that sustains the revolution in the three Sahel countries and was made after extensive coverage of the ongoing social dynamics and geopolitical disputes.
2025

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.
2023

“One, Two, Three, Viva l’Algérie!” is the main theme of our film. But it is first a slogan, a link that acts in space and time: a few words scanded, inseparable from the history of Algerian football and therefore the relationship between France and Algeria. These encouragements born with the FLN team during the Revolutionary War and later repeated in the Algerian epic at the 2010 World Cup were taken out of the stadiums in 2019 to call for change.
2022

Structured as a labyrinth-like game and inspired by Jorge Luis Borges, Aleph is a travelogue of experience, a dreamer's journey through the lives, experiences, stories and musings of protagonists spanning ten countries and five continents.
2021

As the peaceful and determined Hirak movement gathers momentum and hopes for profound political change sweep across Algeria, women are combining femininity and feminism in the past, present, and future.
2020

A leading figure in the Palestinian cause and the fight against imperialism, the Lebanese communist activist Georges Ibrahim Abdallah had been languishing in French prisons for thirty-eight years—a unique case in France. Arrested in Lyon in 1984 with false papers, he was sentenced two years later to four years in prison for possession of weapons and explosives, then in 1987 received a life sentence for complicity in the assassinations in Paris five years earlier of an Israeli Mossad agent and an American military attaché—charges he has always denied. Although he has been eligible for release since 1999, French political authorities, under pressure from the United States and Israel, opposed his release. Interventions by Palestinian figures, his relatives, his lawyer and ex-prisoners from the extreme left, retrace the journey of the village schoolteacher who became an anti-colonial activist.
2020

Albert Camus died at 46 years old on January 4, 1960, two years after his Nobel Prize in literature. Author of “L'Etranger”, one of the most widely read novels in the world, philosopher of the absurd and of revolt, resistant, journalist, playwright, Albert Camus had an extraordinary destiny. Child of the poor districts of Algiers, tuberculosis patient, orphan of father, son of an illiterate and deaf mother, he tore himself away from his condition thanks to his teacher. French from Algeria, he never ceased to fight for equality with the Arabs and the Kabyle, while fearing the Independence of the FLN. Founded on restored and colorized archives, and first-hand accounts, this documentary attempts to paint the portrait of Camus as he was.
2020

Fayçal Hammoum recounts the 2014 presidential election through non-voting inhabitants of Algiers who, like him, are in their thirties. Be it Bilel, a grocer by default exposed to his customers’ political babbling, or the more politically-charged comments of Younes, a militant FM radio journalist opposed to President Bouteflika’s fourth term, the variety of conversational scenes in no way changes the determination not to vote for an old man who has been invisible for almost two years. The rappers Omar and Brahim are as bereft of hope and voter’s cards as the Tellek webradio DJ, since “the match is fixed”. Moving away from his focus on this subject to film their daily life, the filmmaker draws the portrait of a generation who, as Bilal says with poignant simplicity, “just wants to live
2017

The artistic journey of Dahmane El Harrachi, born in 1925 in Algiers, bears the mark of his experience. An attentive and vigilant observer of the environment of immigrant workers, Dahmane has always avoided falling into the ambient miserabilism. From the Algerian Chaâbi, he has kept certain melodic lines and a clear propensity for sayings drawn from the oral poetic tradition. El Harrachi uses simple language, understandable by all popular sectors of the Maghreb, which partly explains its wide success. In 1949, he went to France and it was in cafes, springboard places where people come to breathe the air of the country, that he performed regularly. Elegant, with his beautiful atmosphere, the “bluesman” of the suburbs seduces, upsets and stirs consciences. Discovered late by the new generation, the creator of Ya Rayah met a tragic end, on August 31, 1980, in a car accident, on the Algiers coast which he sublimated above all else.
2014

Illustrated with archival photographs, animations and live action, this film explores the history and historical and spiritual heritage of Emir Abd El-Kader. Algerian leader of the 19th century, was admired by Abraham Lincoln and celebrated to this day by the Red Cross as a great humanitarian. Emir Abd el-Kader, the man who challenged the French armies from 1832 to 1847 before creating the bases of a real Algerian state, is today considered by independent Algeria as one of the most outstanding figures. of its history. The nobility of his attitude after his capture and the very effective protection he brought to the Christians of Damascus at the end of his life also earned him great prestige among his former adversaries. A documentary told in dialectal Arabic by the voice of Amazigh Kateb.
2014

"Gerboise bleue", the first French atomic test carried out on February 13, 1960 in the Algerian Sahara, is the starting point of France's nuclear power. These are powerful radioactive aerial shots carried out in areas belonging to the French army. Underground tests will follow, even after the independence of Algeria. From 1960 to 1978, 30,000 people were exposed in the Sahara. The French army was recognized recognized nine irradiations. No complaint against the army or the Atomic Energy Commission has resulted. Three requests for a commission of inquiry were rejected by the National Defense Commission. For the first time, the last survivors bear witness to their fight for the recognition of their illnesses, and revealed to themselves in what conditions the shootings took place. The director goes to the zero point of "Gerboise Bleue", forbidden access for 47 years by the Algerian authorities
2009

The award-winning filmmaker Peter Lilienthal is dedicated to this extremely poignant documentary of U.S. military policy and the living conditions of former resistance fighters in Latin America.
2008

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.
1987

“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.
1983

Oversand is one of the first films about free climbing, the third film in a series of three with "Overdon" and "Over-Ice". Directed by Jean-Paul Janssen, the film was shot in 35mm in Algeria, in the Sahara Desert, in the Tamanrasset region, on the walls of the majestic peaks of the Atakor massif, central sub-region of Hoggar, mountainous heart of Hoggar, a volcanic plateau of almost circular shape, whose average altitude is 2000 meters, and which culminates at Mount Tahat (2918m), the highest point in Algeria. The Atakor is distinguished by its spectacular volcanic peaks, its needles, and its rugged landscapes, resulting from the erosion of ancient volcanic chimneys, which make it the most emblematic summits of the Hoggar, such as the Assekrem, the Ilamane, or the Tizouyag, where climbers Patrick Edlinger, Patrick Bérhault, Bernard Gorgeon, Hugues Jaillet, Jacques Perrier, Stéphane Troussier and Odette Schoënleb evolve under the watchful eye of the Tuareg caravans.
1981

Three centuries of Venezuela's history as a Spanish colony are considered from economic, political and social standpoints; evocations of the past are compared to the present. Based on the ideas and research of Federico Brito Figueroa, Alfredo A. Alfonso, Miguel A. Saignes, Josefina Jordan, and Thaelman Urgelles among others.
1976

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.
1969

Documentary on the beginnings of Algerian independence filmed during the summer of 1962 in Algiers. The film was banned in France and Algeria but won the Grand Prize at the Leipzig International Film Festival in 1965. Out of friendship, the production company Images de France sent an operator, Bruno Muel, who later declared: "For those who were called to Algeria (for me, 1956-58), participating in a film on independence was a victory over horror, lies and absurdity. It was also the beginning of my commitment to the cinema."
1965

In 1950, the explorer Roger Frison-Roche made a crossing of more than a thousand kilometers on the back of a camel with the photographer Georges Tairraz II, in the heart of the Sahara, from Hoggar then Djanet in Algeria to Ghat in Libya. From their journey they brought back a large number of color films and documents. Among thousands of photos, they selected 47 images which reflect the various aspects of these immense spaces which occupy a third of Africa in the book "The Great Desert". “The Great Desert, 1000 kilometers on camelback” is the eponymous 85-minute documentary of this epic, released in 1950.
1950

The film, shot in 1938, is part of a series entitled “The true face of Algeria”. The film highlights the proximity of Algiers to Paris and promotes air travel. The commentary supporting the images highlights the urban dynamism (“Every day, a new skyscraper replaces a wasteland”) and the comparison with Paris (“Algiers is often nicknamed the Paris of North Africa because of its elegance become proverbial). Contemporary architectural achievements are described as the sign of “grandiose modernism”: “we love the new, the bold”. But the point does not forget the buildings illustrating “the Moorish, classic and attractive style”. The description of the Casbah also attempts to understand the architectural organization but also the diversity and even the atmosphere.
1945