Mohamed Chouikh

The transformations of the daily life of the Algerian people during the destructive French occupation, then during the war of liberation. While military repression is in full swing, a peasant woman finds herself alone in her mountain home when her only son is kidnapped by French soldiers shortly after her husband's death during a raid. One day, seeing a dead chicken, which she considers a bad omen, she decides to leave home and embarks on a painful journey through the mountains. Accompanied by a couple of chickens, she moves from one detention camp to another in a desperate search for her missing son. The film is inspired by the events experienced by the director's family.

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 prison in colonial Algeria, shortly after the end of the Second World War, three indigenous cellmates make out. Once free, they attack the authority represented by the triad of the boss, the gendarme and the administrator. “Living the colonial condition,” confided Tewfik Farès, “is something! It’s not sociologically or historically speaking. It’s life. And I think that’s all there in it. [...] For a hundred and thirty years, we wait. We hold back. We push back. We hope. At the same time, on different occasions, there are skirmishes, unrest.

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 their father dies, three nomadic sons choose different voices. The first part for the city, the second tries to live as its ancestors develop and the third integrates one of the new agricultural cooperations. "A pastoral society (1,500,000 inhabitants) on the threshold of decisive choices, destructured by the evolution of economic relations which lead to the concentration of herds in the hands of a few, to the support of rangelands and to the movement of impoverishment and proletarianization of the greatest number. The attitudes of the protagonists occur in relation to the economic and political involved in the process of agrarian revolution. The alternative lies only in the free adherence of small breeders to the forms of economic and social reorganization of the Agrarian Revolution and their insertion in the profound movements of social and political change that affect Algerian society." Sid Ali Mazif

Depicts the life of Sidi Lakhdar Ben Khlouf, an eminent symbolic figure who is part of the memory of Algerian poetry and popular fight. Sidi Lakhdar Ben Khelouf became famous thanks to his poems about the Prophet Muhammad (earning him the nickname "praiser of the Prophet") and the epic he dedicates to the Battle of Mazagran on August 26, 1558, against the Spaniards. Counted among the patron saints of the Mostaganem region, his poems are often interpreted by chaâbi singers.

Algerian youth of the 1960s, straddling traditional South Mediterranean and Western culture and the desire for emancipation of younger generations to find true love.

El Kalaa, a village in southern Oran. Although already married, old Sidi planned to marry another. He sets his sights on the beautiful Aïssa, with whom Kaddour, his adopted son, is in love. The old man decides to play a trick on Kaddour to teach him never to covet a woman that an elder wants to marry...

The Desert Ark (L'Arche du Desert), a variation on Romeo and Juliet set in the Algerian desert. A young couple must face inevitable conflict when their rival families discover their secret love. Taking refuge in a cave, they listen to the sounds of a senseless campaign of violence and murder, which is the culmination of the extremism that has long divided their two communities. Nominated for the Golden Leopard at the 1997 Locarno Film Festival.

"Rupture is a look at a complex and little-known period in the recent history of Algeria, that of the thirties, a time when a political conscience was beginning to assert itself. I wanted to understand how and by what miracle, despite the small individual and collective revolts that had failed in the past, the unity of the Algerian people had been forged around the reconquest of independence. The main figures who worked, each in their own way, for this idea, are men who have always lived in the shadows and forgotten. And that's how I tried through this film to pay tribute to all those who gave up everything to dedicate themselves to a cause they considered just". Mohamed Chouikh

At a dangerous time in Algeria, 'Douar de Femmes' is a story of ordinary women who manage to defend themselves in extraordinary situations. The film focuses on a small village that has been attacked more often by terrorists from the surrounding mountains. While the men work, the women learn how to handle machine guns and explore the area. “Fear has armed us,” says the young woman Sabrina. But despite that fear, people get married, children come and keep watch.

Seen right through the sandstorms that rack the lives of a tribe living on a desert oasis, is a subtle and not-so-subtle mistreatment of the female members of the tribe - tribal chiefs have the right to be the first to deflower virgins, and single or widowed mothers must walk a narrow line of behavior restrictions that do not apply to their male counterparts. Both genders, however, fight the brunt of the harsh desert winds together.

This portrait from the "Algerian Filmmakers" collection, created by Linda Tahir-Meriau, focuses on Mohamed Chouikh, born in 1943 in Mostaganem, an Algerian actor and director. In 1965, he starred in one of the first major Algerian films, "L'Aube des Damnés" (The Dawn of the Damned) by René Vautier and Ahmed Rachedi. In 1966, he appeared in "Le Vent des Aurès" (The Wind of the Aurès) by Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina. The film won the Best First Feature Award at Cannes. Until 1970, Mohamed Chouikh devoted himself primarily to his acting career in theater and film. It was Michel Drach's film, "Elise Ou La Vraie Vie" (Elise, or Real Life), based on the novel by Claire Etcherelli, that brought him to the attention of French audiences. In the 1970s, he became a director for Algerian television. In 1989, he directed "The Citadel", which was selected for more than 70 international festivals and won around twenty awards.

In Algeria, Youcef escapes from a psychiatric asylum located at the edge of the desert. He was a fighter and, years later, he still believes himself to be a prisoner of the French army. He rejoins what he thinks is his resistance group. He finds the bones of his comrades, buries them, and promises himself that he will visit their families, one after the other, to honor their memory. He goes underground and makes quick forays into the villages. He is struck by what he sees there. Young people queuing for bread, former FLN leaders living in the villas of the colonists, and farm workers mistreated by their Algerian foremen. As for the women, although they played a decisive role in the liberation of the country, they are now cloistered or forced to go out in public wearing masks. When he is discovered by the authorities, Youcef cannot believe that thirty years have passed. This nuisance must be eliminated...

The Dance of the Wind (Arabic: رقصة الريح) is an Algerian-Tunisian film and the fourth feature film by Taïeb Louhichi. Shot digitally, it differs from his previous films in its emphasis on meditation rather than vast outdoor landscapes. While scouting locations for his film in southern Tunisia, director Youssef meets the gaze of a stunning Berber woman who orders him not to film her. This marks the beginning of a wandering journey that leads him to his downfall in the vast desert, prey by day to mirages, by night to his anxieties, childhood memories, his first cinematic experiences, and the fear of seeing his film fail because he has let his mind wander. His car is his only anchor and his means of resistance, thanks to the contents of its trunk where he keeps scripts, photos, and means of subsistence.

A documentary about algerian immigration in France