Cheikh El Hasnaoui, de la maison blanche à l'océan bleu

Cheikh El-Hasnaoui is an Algerian singer who left his country in 1937 without ever setting foot there again. Between 1939 and 1968 he composed most of his repertoire in France. For many years the Algerian cafes of Paris were the stages of his shows. With a handful of artists of his generation, he laid the foundations of modern Algerian song. A fervent defender of women's rights, he claims, as a pioneer, the fight for identity for a plural Algeria. At the end of the Sixties, he ended his artistic career. On July 6, 2002 he died in Saint-Pierre de la Réunion, where he is buried to this day. This 80-minute documentary follows in the footsteps of this extraordinary character. From Kabylia to Saint-Pierre de a Réunion via the Casbah of Algiers and the belly of Paris.

Scream

An experimental essay film about terrorism, media, violence and globalisation. Three infotainment news broadcasts - a rollercoaster, a hijacking, and an influencer - are soundtracked by pulsating experimental electronics that push the psychic residue of a post war-on-terror world out of the unconscious and onto the screen. Capitalism, imperialism, desire; all three are implicated in a nihilism that has seeped from the news into the social psyche.

Kamel Hamadi, Ger Yenzizen

Portrait of the Algerian singer and composer Kamal Hamadi (husband of the singer Noura). Performer, musician, conductor, lyricist, author and composer, he is considered today as the witness par excellence of Algerian artistic action of the 20th century. The film received the Golden Olivier for best documentary 2010 at the Tizi-Ouzou Amazigh Film Festival in Algeria.

Omar La Fraise

Omar, better known as Omar the Strawberry, is an old-fashioned bandit. Forced to flee to Algeria, he makes a living out of petty crime, accompanied by his famous sidekick Roger. After decades of ruling the French criminal underworld, they must come to terms with their new life together, which until now has been one of debauchery and violence.

C'Est Pour Demain

Archie Shepp chez les Touaregs

Il Était Une Fois Cheb Hasni

Lumières

Long quest for a director specializing in commissioned films, who after a depression rediscovers his loved ones, his Casbah district, himself. Taken in hand, for a while, by his Islamist neighbor, it is above all the meeting with an old projectionist giving him a censored history of cinema and Algeria, which helps him to change, and to accept his own fantasies, embodied by Marilyn Monroe and the Andalusian.

Le harem de Mme Osmane

In Algiers in 1993, while the civil war is starting, Mrs Osmane's tenants have to endure her bad temper. Her husband left her and the fear to lose her respectability haunt her. The former member of the Resistance during the Independence War persists in controlling the slightest moves of the households rather than struggle against her own frustrations. Learning her daughter is in love, the possibility of finding herself alone will push her to the limit: The symbolical Mrs Osmane "harem" is about to collapse.

Al Marja (المَرجَة)

On his return to Algeria, Belkacem Hadjadj, a young graduate of INSAS in Brussels, joined Algerian television and signed "Le Bouchon", his first feature in the register of an Italian comedy, around the misadventures of a tenant experiencing a water leak.

La Corniche d'Amour

Two rich tourists, a photographer and a painter, meet during a walk in Kabylia. Their wanderings are an opportunity to highlight the many tourist and picturesque places on the Algerian coast. This film commissioned by the Defense Communication and Audiovisual Production Establishment (ECPAD), attempts to sell a tourist destination when Algeria was in flames with the outbreak of the Algerian national liberation war. Filmed with the colonial lens of the time, the natives are only one element of a picturesque setting, and the final kiss between a French woman and an Arab man is an attempt to demonstrate a pacified country. Despite everything, the film constitutes a precious archive for Béjaïa, which is the subject for the first time of a film which immortalizes a moment in its history, and to introduce the work of Tahar Hannache, actor, cinematographer and director, one of the pioneers of Algerian cinema.

Machaho

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.

Festival Panafricain d'Alger

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.

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.

Ikach

Ikach, is a farce in two acts in popular Arabic, written by André Sarrouy and adapted and directed by himself. A critique of marriage in colonial Algeria at a time when women were little taken into account. Cunning of women and stupidity of husbands, on an original soundtrack composed by Mohamed Iguerbouchène.

La Fête Imprévue

This musical comedy produced in 1953 for the General Government of Algeria, features the comic trio composed of Rouiched, Mohamed Touri and Sid Ali Fernandel, accompanied by the orchestra of the master of the Algiers Chaâbi El Hadj M'hamed El Anka, the singer Fadhéla Dziria, Mustapha Skandrani on the piano. Some scenes were filmed at the Summer Palace (the current Palace of the Algerian Presidency, called the People's Palace). André Zwobada, the director, will play an important role after the independence of Algeria in 1962, in the production and preservation of the first Algerian newsreels.

Casbah

Pepe Le Moko leads a gang of jewel thieves in the Casbah of Algiers, where he has exiled himself to escape imprisonment in his native France.

ليلى وأخواتها

The story of Algerian women trying to live in 1970s Algeria where the society is between conservative values and progressive modern Algeria.

Al-Khutwat Al-Ula

A modern couple seeks to find marital happiness in a context where Algerian society is taking the “first step” towards female emancipation. A woman becomes president of a popular municipal assembly. Will she find happiness ?

Il était une fois dans l'Oued

In 1988, Johnny Leclerc, the son of a Norman mother and an Alsatian father, lives in a suburban housing estate with his friends. He behaves like a Muslim, observes Ramadan and wears a djelaba. He's even convinced that his name is Abdelbachir and that he was born in a small village in the bled. When his friend Yacine gets into trouble with a local kaid and decides to return to Algeria for the vacations, he smuggles himself into the Sabri family's luggage to fulfill his dream and finally get to know his "roots". As soon as he arrived on the Algerian coast, Johnny felt right at home. But Yacine is opposed to his father, who wants to arrange his marriage.