An old North African man, sitting in an Algerian bar, remembers his life spent in France.
Social & External
Unknown Role
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 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.
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 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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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 film is set in a signalman's house during the German occupation. When it turns out that the mother has committed adultery with a German, things start to go downhill for the father. Germans take over his land, and his children fend for themselves.
Pastor Paul Lempelius comes to the island of HIiumaa that seems to be like the world's end. While serving the pastorate of Reigi in spirit and in truth, Lempelius hopes to get rid of the burden of destiny. However, the local people favour pagan traditions and distrust the strict kingdom of God that Lempelius teaches them. The pastor's beautiful yet childless wife Catharina yearns for joy of life and tenderness that she won't receive from his husband. Instead, a young assistant pastor Jonas Kempe offers her his love. Their love, disregarding all laws, and the primal lifestyle of the islanders will become the touchstone for Lempelius' redemption.
This song-and-dance musical follows the journey of an island girl with a natural gift for dancing as she navigates through life in the city to follow her dreams and find love along the way.
Joonas and Tiidrik are two men from the island of Saaremaa who recklessly escape from the German prison during the First World War. Yet, there are no peaceful times in their home country neither.
Heino Raagen and his war comrades begin a new battle while arriving at their home village - establishing a collective farm. The sufferings and fears of the war have exhausted people; nevertheless, they still stick together and protect their close ones. Heino's girlfriend Valve hides the plans of her brother Robert hiding in the forest from him; as a result, their relationship will fall apart. Life goes on, but disappointment and anger will take their toll even when years have gone by.
Teenager Juulius loses his mother and goes to live with Taavi, a wise fisherman. Juulius gets to know the daily life in the fisherman's village, falls in love for the first time, and realizes the complexity of the relationships between those of older generation. While leaving for a stormy sea of life from the village he has still some hope in order to come back to his love and his home port.
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.
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.
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.
A hard-living salesman becomes a quadriplegic after an accident.
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.
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.
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.
Mathieu lives in Paris, Alice in a small seaside resort in Western France. He is a famous actor, about to turn fifty. She is a piano teacher in her forties. They were in love fifteen years ago, then separated. Time has passed. They each went their ways and slowly healed. When Mathieu goes try to overcome his melancholia in a thermal spa, he stumbles upon Alice.
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.
Thomas Montgomery, a married father of two young daughters, gets seduced by the world of online gambling and chat rooms where a virtual romance and sexual obsession ultimately leads to the murder of an innocent man.
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.
On the French island of Mont Saint-Michel, Jack, a failed presidential candidate, Tom, a poet and Sonia, a physicist, engage in an intellectual conversation about politics, philosophy and life over the course of a single day.
In order to be reinstated to the bar and recover custody of her daughter, a hotshot lawyer, now in recovery and on probation, must take on the appeal of a woman wrongfully convicted of murder.
Ex-fighter Raymundo forms an unlikely bond with a disgruntled man whose life and relationship with his daughter are unraveling. The men join forces to win a fight that could very well save Raymundo, his wife and their child.
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?
A pair of twin brothers from East L.A. choose to live their lives differently and end up on opposite sides of the law.
