Actor: Mohamed Chouikh

Dawn of the Damned

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.

The Winds of the Aures

Le Vent des Aurès – the first road movie of Algerian cinema – describes the transformations of the daily life of the Algerian people during the destructive French occupation, then during the war of liberation. While military repression is in full swing, a peasant woman finds herself alone in her mountain home when her only son is kidnapped by French soldiers shortly after her husband's death during a raid. One day, seeing a dead chicken, which she considers a bad omen, she decides to leave home and embarks on a painful journey through the mountains. Accompanied by a couple of chickens, she moves from one detention camp to another in a desperate search for her missing son. The film is inspired by the events experienced by the director's family.

The Nomads

When their father dies, three nomadic sons choose different voices. The first part for the city, the second tries to live as its ancestors develop and the third integrates one of the new agricultural cooperations. "A pastoral society (1,500,000 inhabitants) on the threshold of decisive choices, destructured by the evolution of economic relations which lead to the concentration of herds in the hands of a few, to the support of rangelands and to the movement of impoverishment and proletarianization of the greatest number. The attitudes of the protagonists occur in relation to the economic and political involved in the process of agrarian revolution. The alternative lies only in the free adherence of small breeders to the forms of economic and social reorganization of the Agrarian Revolution and their insertion in the profound movements of social and political change that affect Algerian society." Sid Ali Mazif

L'Obstacle

Algerian youth of the 1960s, straddling traditional South Mediterranean and Western culture and the desire for emancipation of younger generations to find true love.

The Outlaws

In prison in colonial Algeria, shortly after the end of the Second World War, three indigenous cellmates make out. Once free, they attack the authority represented by the triad of the boss, the gendarme and the administrator. “Living the colonial condition,” confided Tewfik Farès, “is something! It’s not sociologically or historically speaking. It’s life. And I think that’s all there in it. [...] For a hundred and thirty years, we wait. We hold back. We push back. We hope. At the same time, on different occasions, there are skirmishes, unrest.