You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in French. (December 2011) Click [show] for important translation instructions.
View a machine-translated version of the French article.
Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.
Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 1,631 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization.
Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing French Wikipedia article at [[:fr:Cinéma algérien]]; see its history for attribution.
You may also add the template {{Translated|fr|Cinéma algérien}} to the talk page.
Cinema of Algeria refers to the film industry based in the north African country of Algeria.
The colonial era
During the era of French colonization, movies were predominantly a propaganda tool for the French colonial state.[3] Although filmed in Algeria and viewed by the local population, the vast majority of "Algerian" cinema in this era was created by Europeans.
The colonial propaganda films themselves generally depicted a stereotypically image of pastoral life in the colony, often focusing on an aspect of local culture that the administration sought to change,[citation needed] such as polygamy. One example of such a film is Albert Durec's 1928 Le Désir.
Popular French cinema filmed or set in Algeria often echoed many of the tropes common in administration-funded films. For example, L'Atlantide was a wildly popular 1921 French-Belgian silent movie filmed in the Aurès Mountains, Djidjelli, and Algiers in what was then French Algeria.[4][page needed] Although not explicitly about Algeria, the movie (itself based on a popular book) depicts two French Foreign Legion officers and their love affair with the lascivious queen of a fictional Saharan kingdom. One of the earliest films to engage with the French presence in North Africa, the film emphasizes not only the romance and exoticism of the venture, but also European anxieties over their role in Africa and the possibly dangerous effects of inter-racial contact.[5] Other films with similar themes followed, including Le Bled (1929), Le Grand Jeu (1934), and La Bandera (1935).
European domination of the means of cinematic production ended in the early days of the Algerian War, when several Algerian nationalists from the National Liberation Army (ALN) obtained basic film-making equipment which they used to create four short programs. These films were screened via a relay system to viewers in a variety of sympathetic socialist nations.[citation needed] Their content supported the growing nationalist rebellion, including the place of ALN hospitals and a Mujahideen attack on the French mines of the Société de l'Ouenza.
The emergence of Algerian cinema in the 1960s and 1970s
Algeria became an independent nation in 1962, a topic which garnered heavy attention amongst Algerian movie productions of the 1960s and 1970s.
Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina's canonical 1967 film The Winds of the Aures depicts a rural farming family whose lives are destroyed by colonialism and war. The plot depicts the tragic plight of a mother who leaves her home in the Aurès mountains of eastern Algeria to search desperately for her son, a nationalist who has followed in his father's footsteps but been captured by the French army. Symbolically, the film uses the family to represent the fate of the nation: impoverished, exploited, but struggling to be free.[6] The film won an award at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival for Best First Work.[7]
Outside of Algeria, one of the most famous films of this era is ''The Battle of Algiers'' (1966), an Algerian-Italian co-production that obtained three Oscar nominations.
Along with decolonization and the Algerian War, the plight of urban youth is another common theme. One example of this theme is Merzak Allouache's Omar Gatlato.
Algerian cinema slumped in the mid-1980s, and major productions became rare. Some[citation needed] attribute this fact to the state's unwillingness to subsidize Algerian film. There were a few success, including Mohamed Oukassi's 1994 comedy Carnival fi Dachra, filmed in Maghrebi Arabic and following the story of a man who runs for mayor of his village (or "dachra") only to be seduced by power and seek to become the president of Algeria. Director Merzak Allouache's Athmane Aliouet and Salut Cousin! (1996) are two other examples of Algerian comedies produced in this era.
Some [citation needed] characterize contemporary Algerian cinema to be in a rebuilding phase. The recent trend has been an increase of Francophone cinema, as opposed to films in Algerian Arabic. Some [citation needed] attribute this to the Francophone market encouraged by increased immigration to France in the 1990s. For example, Franco-Algerian productions such as Rachid Bouchareb's Outside the Law have met with great success (and controversy).
A full statistical report on the cinema industry in Algeria, edited by Euromed Audiovisual and the European Audiovisual Observatory can be found on the Observatory's website here.[8]
