Director: Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina
1975 / 177min / DCP
Winner of the Palme d’Or at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival, Lakhdar-Hamina’s impassioned anti-imperialist film-in-six-chapters travels from 1939 to the outset of the Algerian War of Independence in 1954 alongside Ahmed (Yorgo Voyagis), the son of a rural village ravaged by drought and famine, as he evolves from passive acceptance of his people’s lot to active participation in the burgeoning revolutionary movement. “I tried to recount, with dignity and nobility, this uprising that then became the Algerian Revolution, an uprising not only against the coloniser, but against a certain human condition.” —Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina
Distributor: Janus Films
Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Image Retrouvée and L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratories. Restoration funded by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. This restoration is part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers and UNESCO – in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna – to help locate, restore, and disseminate African cinema.
Introduction by Madeleine Dobie, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, on Sunday, April 5th