Cheb Hasni, Je vis encore ! (2008)

The portrait of Eldridge Cleaver, the "Minister of Information" for the Black Panthers movement, in exile in Algiers.

An Algerian doctor decides to leave the troubles in Algiers and goes back to his hometown, a small village lost in the mountains. There, however, the situation is explosive as well, as the guerilla is active and the French military has to keep a close watch on the locals...

The beginings of the Algerian Revolution as seen through the eyes of a peasant.

Directed by Moussa Haddad.

Directed by Abderrazek Hammami.

Directed by Mohamed Chouikh.

1957, the town of Mostaganem, Algeria: the country is still under French occupation, and repression of the National Liberation Front is at its height. The authorities indulge in torture, intimidation and public executions.

Algeria from above is the first documentary made entirely from the sky on Algeria. Through the eye of the famous Yann Arthus-Bertrand this documentary vividly depicts this great country, and its vibrant cultural and natural treasures. From North to South and from West to East, it shows us the entirety of Algeria, lives in the large hectic coastal cities, Atlas mountains, oases of the Sahara or gentle hills of the Sahel. With a rich past that seems to have crossed all civilizations, and a territory where all natural environments amalgamate, Algeria appears here in all its diversity and its unity.

In this remarkable adaptation of Arezki Mellal’s novel, a family must defend itself amidst the onslaught of violence between government forces and radical Islamists in 1980s Algeria.

Directed by Sid Ali Mazif.

This black-and-white film – the first road movie of Algerian cinema – presents one of the most readily apparent, though subtle, transformations of the daily life of the people of Algeria brought about by the ordeal of French occupation and the war of liberation. With military repression in full force, a peasant woman finds herself alone in her house in the mountains when her only son is taken away by French soldiers soon after her husband is killed in a raid. One day, on seeing a dead chicken, which she considers a bad omen, she decides to leave home, and sets off on a tiring journey through the mountains. With a pair of chickens in tow, she moves from one detention camp to the next in a desperate search for her missing son. The film was inspired by events experienced by the family of its director.

In Kabylie, rude mountain region in the north of Algeria. Arezki finds the young Larbi exhausted, buried under the snow. He takes him in and nurses him until he's recovered. The host seduces Arezki's daughter. She is pregnant. This is an unsupportable shame to the father of the female sinner. Arezki claims vengeance. He leaves his house and takes the oath not to come back before having killed Larbi who betrayed him under his own roof.

This rambling political melodrama tells the story of a French Breton who learns about colonialism while teaching native students in France's colonies of Tunisia and Algeria and returns to his native Brittany to see that the same conditions prevail there.

Using his personal background, Brazilian Karim Aïnous invites the audience to follow/discover an incredible journey through space and time, with an original and usually unknown prism/aspect : The strong bound between Algeria and Brazil, two countries with political and revolutionary strikes that mould their evolution.

The first Algerian fictional feature.

In 1962, René Vautier, together with some Algerian friends, organised the audio-visual formation centre Ben Aknoun to encourage a "dialogue in images" between the two factions. Together with his students he made a film that shows the history of the Algerian War and of the ALN (National Liberation Army), and life during the reconstruction.

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.