Samia Meziane

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.

When the War of Independence ends, a widow must find a roof for her six children. Luckily, a Frenchman about to leave offers her the house he is about to vacate. But a high-placed local bureaucrat does not agree to such a gift. After losing all hope of obtaining the property due to the bias of the local authorities, she decides to go to the capital with her children to speak to the president of the Republic.

Three young friends—a girl (Asma) and two boys (Fawzi and Ramdane)—bound by a loving friendship, lead a carefree life. The riots of October 1988, the repression, the democratic explosion, and the Islamist drift that followed turn their lives upside down. Fawzi, a journalist involved in the independent press movement, and Ramdane, a doctor sensitive to the concerns of ordinary people, drift apart, separate, and find themselves caught up in a confrontation that is beyond their control. Asma tries in vain to prevent the trio from breaking up... But none of the three emerges unscathed...

They come from completely different worlds, but over the course of a single day and night, their lives collide. What starts as a clinical relationship slowly turns into something deeper—almost like a shared understanding of the same struggle.

In the ruins of his devastated village, Marwan finds himself the guardian of nine orphans. To honor the dead and defy the void, he makes a promise: to save their millennial tradition and sew their eid clothes. Joined by Rania, a rebellious seamstress, he plungs into the heart of chaos for a race against time where every stitch becomes an act of resistance to mend the thread of life and bring back the children's smiles.