The Battle of Algiers
Contemporary audiences could be forgiven for thinking Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers is a documentary; this shocking and powerful war movie is neorealism to the nth degree. A jittery, hand-held portrait of rebels vs. the French government during the near decade-long Algerian war, Pontecorvo used mostly non-professional actors and a newsreel approach to the explosive dramatics. Nominated for several Oscars, including Best Foreign Language Film and Director, the film won the Golden Lion at the 1966 Venice Film Festival.
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About David Zeiger
Guggenheim Fellow David Zeiger has been making documentary films and series for 20 years, starting with The Band, a film about his son’s junior year in high school, broadcast on the PBS series P.O.V. in 1997. His short documentary, Funny Old Guys, was broadcast in 2002 by HBO. His 2006 film, Sir! No Sir!, ran theatrically in 65 cities throughout the U.S. and Canada and was broadcast in 200 countries worldwide. It won Best Documentary at the Los Angeles Film Festival (Audience Award) and Hamptons Film Festival, and Seeds of War Award at the Full Frame Documentary Festival. In 2010 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2012 completed his first narrative feature, Sweet Old World.
That movie serves as a warning about those who call everything terrorism.
Algeria is always my favorite country as I use to have a Kabyle Pen pal in Tazi Ouzo region it is mixed with all kinds of religions funny enough Muslims and Christians alike. It was one where I correspond with Boussad Arkoub in the North African country as a westerner they are more looking towards the eastern than the western polities but is getting better each day with its opening it up to foreigners once again, no bandits on the beach asking us British to leave because a new war going to start with the French and all that by different terrorists groups in Algeria
Someone told me that those woman are actors or members of a terrorist group in real life in the 1960’s where France claimed that it was a terrorist group. But all maybe untrue and part of an acting role.
While the women in the famous 1966 film The Battle of Algiers were played by actors, their roles were entirely based on real-life Algerian freedom fighters—such as Zohra Drif and Djamila Bouhired—who were labeled and prosecuted as terrorists by the French colonial government for their guerrilla bomb-planting operations during the War of Independence.