Algeria

  • Tariq Teguia – Thwara Zanj AKA Zanj Revolution AKA Revolution Zendj (2013)

    Tariq Teguia2011-2020AlgeriaArthousePolitics

    Quote:
    Ibn Battuta works as a journalist for an Algerian daily newspaper. While covering community clashes in Southern Algeria, he finds himself incidentally picking up the trail of long forgotten uprisings against the Abbasid Caliphate, back in 8th-9th century Iraq. For the purpose of his investigation he goes to Beirut, a city that used to embody the hopes and struggles of the Arab World…Read More »

  • Brahim Tsaki – Histoire d’une rencontre aka Hikayat liqa’ aka Tale of an Encounter (1983)

    1981-1990AlgeriaBrahim TsakiDramaRomance

    Quote:
    The pure fire of silence

    She’s playing tennis against the fence, she’s alone, with her back to the court, she takes a few steps to pick up a ball that has not been returned to her by this fence ; her steps, gestures and the sound of the ball in the racket are already making a kind of rhythm, a small ballet reduced to its simplest expression. The camera advances on the courtyard, crosses the gate, fixes itself on a torchiere in the distance. That’s the color of her hair.
    Credits: still images and spitting fire have the same rhythm as her racket strikes, then the same rhythm as the shutter release of her camera which finds her in the second scene.Read More »

  • Ahmed Lallem – Elles AKA The Women (1966)

    1961-1970African CinemaAhmed LallemAlgeriaDocumentaryShort Film

    This is another one from the Sarah Maldoror ouvre. She assisted director Lallem for this short documentary, and the two of them assistant-directed William Klein’s Festival Panafricain d’Alger (1970).

    Description from DocumentaMadrid:
    Maldoror works alongside Ahmed Lallem as his assistant director to show young Algerian teenage girls talking about their hopes and desires for the nascent country. The film is an important counterpart to The Battle of Algiers, a film on which Sarah Maldoror and Gillo Pontecorvo would also work together.Read More »

  • Tariq Teguia – Thwara Zanj AKA Zanj Revolution AKA Revolution Zendj (2013) (HD)

    2011-2020AlgeriaDramaPoliticsTariq Teguia

    PLOT
    During the “Arab sprig” an Algerian journalist (Ibn Battutâ) researches the history of the Zanj revolution, from IX century. On his path he mets a young Palestinian student (Nahla).Read More »

  • Mounia Meddour – Papicha (2019)

    2011-2020AlgeriaDramaMounia Meddour

    Synopsis:
    Algiers, 1997. The country is in the hands of terrorist groups, seeking to establish an Islamic and archaic state. Women are particularly affected and oppressed by primitive diktas, who seek to take control of their bodies and control their passage through the public space. While a frenzied hunt for women unveiled is launched, Nedjma, a young student passionate about fashion, is determined to federate the girls of her campus to organize a fashion show braving all the forbidden.Read More »

  • Gillo Pontecorvo – La battaglia di Algeri AKA The Battle of Algiers (1966)

    1961-1970AlgeriaAmos Vogel: Film as a Subversive ArtDramaGillo PontecorvoWar

    Quote:
    The most electrifyingly timely movie playing in New York was made in 1965. Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers is famous, but for some time it’s been available only in washed-out prints with poorly translated, white-on-white subtitles. The newly translated and subtitled 35-millimeter print at Film Forum is presumably the version that was privately screened in August for military personnel by the Pentagon as a field guide to fighting terrorism. Former national-security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski volunteered this blurb: “If you want to understand what’s happening right now in Iraq, I recommend The Battle of Algiers.” I wonder if these politicos are aware that Pontecorvo’s epic was once used by the Black Panthers as a training film? In fact, not much in the current Iraq situation is historically comparable to the late-fifties Algerian struggle for independence dramatized in The Battle of Algiers, but its anatomy of terror remains unsurpassed—and, woefully, ever fresh.Read More »

  • Assia Djebar – La zerda ou Les chants de l’oubli AKA The Zerda and the Songs of Forgetting (1983)

    1981-1990AlgeriaAssia DjebarDocumentary

    This film essay pieces together various photographs and footage of the Zerda ceremony from colonial archives, with anonymous poetic voiceovers recounting the lived experiences of indigenous Algerians. This pairing examines the contrast between the foreign perspective and the reality of the lives being viewed from that perspective, and the soundtrack is interspersed with “songs of forgetting” to recognize traditions that are being lost to colonialism even as they are tokenized by and subjugated to the colonial gaze.Read More »

  • Mohamed Chouikh – El kalaa AKA The Citadel (1989)

    1981-1990AlgeriaArthouseDramaMohamed Chouikh

    Synopsis:
    Set in a rugged little Algerian mountain village, in a moslem culture, where male and female society works under a strongly patriarchal controlling influence. Insensitive and brutish Sidi has three wives, one-near suicide, and an adoptive son whom he beats and intends to force into a farcical marriage. Simple-minded Kaddour cannot find a bride and is eventually married to a mannequin dummy…Read More »

  • Yamina Bachir – Rachida (2002)

    2001-2010AlgeriaDramaYamina Bachir

    Rachida lives and teaches in a popular neighborhood in Argel. Like most of her countrymen, she thinks the conflict which is bleeding out her country does not affect her, until the day she is confronted by a group of terrorists that includes a former student of hers, Sofiane. The group asks her to plant a bomb in her school. When she refuses, the terrorists shoot her in cold blood. She saves her life miraculously and takes refuge in a nearby village.Read More »

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