An old North African man, sitting in an Algerian bar, remembers his life spent in France.
Social & External
Unknown Role
The arrival in France of the first generation of Algerian immigrants. In the early sixties, Kader, soon joined by his wife Myriam, tries to build a new life on French soil. Like many other couples, they soon find themselves torn between the dream of returning to their homeland and that of prospering in a land that is not always welcoming.
In the middle of the Algerian war, Elise, from Bordeaux, “goes” to Paris to join her brother to earn her living in an automobile factory. There she meets Arezki, an Algerian nationalist activist with whom she falls in love. A chronicle of working life at the time and which highlights the extent of police repression against Algerians.
In 1971, the Algerian government nationalized hydrocarbons. The consequences of this decision on the community of Algerians in France are numerous. The Galti family is prey to these economic problems. The father, Khaled, former member of the F.L.N. in France, does not escape the sentence. Sharazade, his wife and comrade in combat, finds herself torn between her role as wife, mother and nostalgia for a country and a bygone past. As for his son Karim, a victim of socio-cultural division, all he has left is refusal.
"For more than ten years, Algeria has been living a slow war, a war without a front line but having caused more than 100,000 deaths. It is this desert that Zina and Kamel – two young Algerians sometimes hallucinated and joyful, sometimes dejected and serene – will want to travel one last time before leaving it for elsewhere. Road Movie on the territories of a city, Algiers whose construction sites are in decline. Roma wa la n'touma will show that fleeing abroad is not is not a refusal of combat, but an obscure struggle against assignment. Tariq Teguia
In a working-class immigrant neighborhood slated for demolition, Jo, the son of Ali, known as the Rescuer from the Algerian war, lives idle and delinquent, committing small assaults to pay for his drugs. One day, while attacking Slim's bar, he is arrested by Ben, a young beur cop torn between his roots and the imperatives of his mission to maintain public order. Giving in to the respect and friendship he feels for Ali, Ben agrees to release his son. But alas, far from calming down, Jo drifts deeper into violence, until the inevitable drama.
A construction worker on a construction site in the Paris suburbs, Mehdi takes the bus to return home after work. Wishing to get off while the vehicle is stationary in a traffic jam, the driver refuses: while restarting, the bus hits the car in front of it. The bus driver attacks Mehdi whom he holds responsible for the incident, claiming that it is forbidden to “talk to the stagehand”. Mehdi is implicated in court and his lawyer tries to draw attention to the living conditions of immigrant workers.
The film mixes fiction, filmed documents and interviews which recounts the arrival in Paris of an Algerian immigrant lost in the metro. On December 27, 1968, France and Algeria signed an agreement which admitted each year 35,000 Algerian workers to French territory in the France of the Trente Glorieuses where the annual growth rate reached 5% and where factories lacked workers. Candidates obtain a residence permit valid for 5 years for themselves and their families. Paris is committed to improving professional training and housing conditions for immigrants, too often confined to the most thankless jobs and often housed in slums. A testimony on the living conditions of emigrant workers "economic cannon fodder" of neocolonialism which simultaneously develops its alter ego, institutionalized racism, as a tool of social stagnation and division of the proletarian class.
The Three Cousins is a comedy-drama by René Vautier released in 1970 about the living conditions of three Algerian immigrant cousins looking for work in Paris. Housed in a narrow construction shed, the coal stove will cause them to suffocate. The Three Cousins won the Best Human Rights Film Award in Strasbourg in 1970.
In 1955, a year after the birth of the National Liberation Front (FLN), Mahmoud was expelled from Algeria by the colonial authorities who feared his revolutionary speeches. At the age of 27, he arrived in the Algerian slum of Nanterre. Roughly questioned by FLN activists, in disagreement with the Algerian Nationalist Movement (MNA) who wanted to recognize theirs, he was then accepted as the local hairdresser and shoemaker. Subsequently, he became a driver during anti-MNA expeditions. Accepting increasingly dangerous missions, he is imprisoned by the French police and once again undergoes interrogations and special treatment by the police which will definitively undermine his sanity. One day, he no longer recognized his companions, and when joy broke out among the FLN militants, at the announcement of the signing of the Evian Accords, Mahmoud remained alone, frozen in an attitude of refusal, walled in his madness. Algeria has just won its independence.
Ali in Wonderland unveils the condition of immigrant workers in Paris in the 1970s. It is a cry of anger against exploitation and racism, uncompromisingly raising the role of the French state, the media, capitalism, and colonization in this system of domination that crushes those who suffer it. In this experimental essay on the condition of Algerian migrants in Giscard's France in the mid-1970s, every aesthetic choice has a precise and legible political motivation and gives body and voice to a figure completely absent from the experimental cinema of the time: that of the immigrant worker. Abouda is one of the children of immigrants seen in the film, and not a simple activist serving a cause, which is why the emotion of her experimental gesture, which she throws in the viewer's face, springs from a ferocity inscribed in her body, from an insatiable anger that inhabits her gaze.
An unemployed Algerian worker leaves Paris by hitchhiking. He soon found himself in Brittany and, seduced by the beauty of wild gorse, eventually established himself as a gorse merchant. But for problems with parking his little cart, he had a rough explanation with a law enforcement officer. The happy intervention of factory workers, the eager kindness they showed him, saved him from despair. This film is part of a trilogy "Them And Us" with the films "Les 3 Cousins" and "Techniquement Si Simple".
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.
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.
A 13-year-old girl deals with the issues brought about by her family's high-priced son.
Two strangers have a fateful one-night stand in Montréal.
A young man still to find a place in the sun puts up an innocent bluff to a young girl he chances upon. They meet frequently since then. Bluffs continue to pile up. There is no way out. In a desperate bid the young man tries to break the wealth barrier. His friend, well placed in life, cautions him. He turns a deaf ear. The inevitable happens. The young man grows wiser but pays heavily for it.
Two Vietnam vets, Tom and Nordi, live sad lives in a crumbling New Jersey city. Sharing a one room apartment, they talk about their inability to hold down real work, struggle to get noticed at the VA and fail to connect with women. This changes for Tom when he meets Marcella and they begin a relationship. However, he can't escape his past with Nordi and the toxic bond soon takes a gruesome turn.
A Naxalite revolutionary escapes police custody and begins to question his beliefs whilst hiding out in a luxury apartment.
A woman has a close bond with her beloved Algeriann grandfather, who protected her from a toxic home life as a child; his death triggers a deep identity crisis as tensions between her extended family members escalate, revealing new depths of resentment and bitterness.
Algiers, 1938. Meursault, a quiet and unassuming employee in his early thirties, attends his mother's funeral without shedding a tear. The next day, he begins a casual affair with Marie, a work colleague. He quickly slips back into his usual routine.
A shady Parisian tries to take advantage of a family of French-descended Algerians forced to move to France.
A man reflects on the lost love of his youth and his long-ago journey from Taiwan to America as he begins to reconnect with his estranged daughter.
Back from a tour of duty, Kelli struggles to find her place in her family and the rust-belt town she no longer recognizes.
An American in Paris lives by sponging off his working friends, and throws a party using borrowed money when his rich American aunt dies, believing firmly in his horoscope.
Daniel lives with his grandmother and, after a year of high school, goes to live with his mother in the south of France; a harsher environment which rapidly changes his perception of friends, work, and women.
Waking up in an unfamiliar city, a man with no memory must confront the mysteries of his own identity. However, his desperate search to uncover the past pits him against a powerful enemy, leading to a showdown that ultimately reveals the truth.
The legendary Roberto Duran and his equally legendary trainer Ray Arcel change each other's lives.
An unlikely friendship evolves over one wild night in LA between a struggling journalist and actor Hervé Villechaize, the world's most famous gun-toting dwarf, resulting in life-changing consequences for both.
Aissa, a young officer of Algerian origin, tragically loses his life during a fresher initiation ritual at the prestigious French military academy of Saint-Cyr. As the death tears through his family, controversy arises over Aissa’s funeral plans when the Army refuses to take responsibility. Ismael, his older, rebellious brother, tries to keep the family united as they fight to win justice for Aissa.
Agnès Varda eloquently captures Paris in the sixties with this real-time portrait of a singer set adrift in the city as she awaits test results of a biopsy. A chronicle of the minutes of one woman’s life, Cléo from 5 to 7 is a spirited mix of vivid vérité and melodrama, featuring a score by Michel Legrand and cameos by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.
Mélanie, 16 years old, lives with her mother. She likes going to school, her friends, playing the cello, and she wants to change the world. But when she meets a boy on the Internet and falls in love with him, her world changes as she is gradually recruited by Daesh. Sonia is 17 years old, and she almost did something irrevocable to “guarantee” her family a place in paradise. These teenage girls might be called Anaïs, Manon or Leila, and one day they all might go some way down the recruitment process. But can they ever come back from it?
Evangelist Carlton Pearson is ostracized by his church for preaching that there is no Hell.
Set in France during the struggle for Algerian independence, Messaoud's mother is terminally ill and his father, needing to work long hours in the factory, can't look after him, so decides to put him and his older brother Abdel in foster care. Sent to the countryside, Abdel has to work on a farm, but Messaoud is taken in by a childless woman, who conceals his Arab origins from her fiercely Gaullist ex-army husband. Re-named Michel/Michou, and with his hair comically dyed blond, the young boy quickly steals the hearts of both foster-parents, and eventually is instrumental in saving their troubled marriage.
When lapsed Jew and former cardiologist Harry suddenly decides to spend his retirement as a pig farmer in Nazareth, Israel, the move deeply shocks his family and his new neighbours. Back in New York, Harry’s ex-wife Monica is trying to manage the lives of their adult children, Annabelle and David, as well as her own.
Stéphanie, a police officer working for Internal Affairs, is assigned to a case involving a young man severely wounded during a tense and chaotic demonstration in Paris. While she finds no evidence of illegitimate police violence, the case takes a personal turn when she discovers the victim is from her hometown.
Jamie Fitzpatrick and Nona Alberts are two women from opposites sides of the social and economic track, but they have one thing in common: a mission to fix their community's broken school and ensure a bright future for their children. The two women refuse to let any obstacles stand in their way as they battle a bureaucracy that's hopelessly mired in traditional thinking, and they seek to re-energize a faculty that has lost its passion for teaching.
A hard-living salesman becomes a quadriplegic after an accident.
Raf and Julie, a couple on the verge of breaking up, find themselves in an emergency ward bordering on collapse on the evening of a Parisian Yellow Vest protest. Their encounter with Yann, an angry and injured demonstrator, will shatter each person's certainties and prejudices. Outside, the tension escalates.
