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Larbi Zekkal

Larbi Zekkal

Acting

Known For

Les suspects
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Mahfoud is a young teacher at a technical school in Algiers. Using his technical and computer skills, he refurbishes an old weaving loom that he intends to present at an international inventors’ conference in Germany. However, his travel plans are thwarted by administrative obstacles. Meanwhile, his neighbors keep a close eye on him, especially the elderly M’nouar, marked by the terrible memories of the Algerian War. He sees everything and everyone with suspicion. As far as he is concerned, Mahfoud has no good intentions—he may even be involved in subversive activities. Naturally, it does not help that Mahfoud is in a relationship with Samia, a young psychiatrist who has returned to the country after studying in Belgium. She challenges local norms and breaks taboos that unsettle those around her. In the end, Mahfoud manages to obtain a visa to attend the international fair. His invention wins a prize, and when he returns home, he receives a very different kind of welcome.

Les suspects

2004Movie
Opium and the Stick
7.8

In 1950, in Algeria, in a village in Kabylia, Algerian resistance fighters resisted the French occupation army. Bachir returns to the village to escape the clashes ravaging Algiers. In Thala, he has two brothers, Ali and BelaĂŻd. The first is engaged with the ALN (The National Liberation Army) and fights against the colonizer. His second brother, BelaĂŻd, the eldest, is convinced of a French Algeria. His family torn apart, Bachir decides to join the war and takes sides against the repression of the French army. The French army is trying in vain to turn the population against the insurgents by using disinformation. The more time passes, the more the inhabitants of the village and surrounding areas, oppressed, rally to the cause of the FLN, their houses and their fields will be burned... Adaptation to the cinema of the eponymous novel Opium and the Stick, published in 1965, by Mouloud Mammeri, the film was dubbed into Tamazight (Berber), a first for Algerian cinema.

Opium and the Stick

1970Movie
The Honour of the Tribe
9.0

Like every year in Zitouna, a bear handler passes by. With his creature, he comes to challenge the small community. And like every year, it is Slimane El Mabrouk who defends the honor of the tribe. But this time, he dies, leaving two orphans, Omar and Ourida. Robbed of their inheritance, the children will grow up alone. The years pass, the French army settles in, and with it, the war. Mysteriously, one day, after the murder of a French legionnaire, Omar disappears into the bush, while his sister dies in childbirth. Omar will return to the village, much later, once independence has been acquired, as a representative of power and with this enigmatic formula: "You must know that the Revolution has not forgotten you". Personal revenge? Sincere desire to bring progress and modernity? ... The inhabitants of Zitouna, upset in their ancestral way of life, will not be long in having an answer to their questions.

The Honour of the Tribe

1993Movie
Ali in Wonderland
9.5

In the 1980s, barely 18 years after Algeria's independence, Algerian immigration to France massively fueled the construction industry, responding to a demand for hard, undervalued labor. Behind the idea of ​​"selective immigration," these men were recruited primarily for their bras and their knock-kneed hands, shaped by construction sites. Invisible yet essential, they built roads, buildings, and infrastructure, often at the cost of precarious conditions. Ali, an Algerian crane operator in France, philosophically accepts the harassment faced by immigrants like himself on construction sites and in daily life. He hopes to escape his situation with the money he wins in the lottery, and from the top of his crane, he allows himself to dream, observing the world through binoculars. One day, the jackpot falls...

Ali in Wonderland

1980Movie