Sidali Kouidri Filali is a 35 year old civil servant and blogger who has chosen to campaign with Barakat to « defend his country ». He estimates that this time, the Algerian regime, trapped in its own “cocoon”, will not survive the contestation: an interview.
Laying bare the social and economic structures of oppression to reconstruct a national psyche from the ruins – how an idea caught on.
In the weeks after the 1991 elections, official Algerian rhetoric too was replete with appeals to the popular will and the promises of a swift and total return to democracy. Promises that, two decades on, have yet to be fulfilled.
The film shows a popular revolution above all else.
What we see is a three dimensional character who is eloquent and thoughtful in his actions.
Fracking has raised major concerns for its substantial use of water (particularly worrying for the Sahara) and for the potential leaking of these chemical substances into groundwater.
Away from the traditional circles of power, a new force has been working its way up to the surface of the Algerian political landscape: that of organised youth activism.
It was the French colonisers, after all, who were bound to international conventions that govern the practice of harm in a way that a small groups of individuals like the Algerians, were not.
On February 6, 2013, the University of Sussex History Department held a special screening of the Battle of Algiers, followed by discussion with Yasmin El Derby from the Middle East and North Africa Film Festival in London. Here are three reactions.
A 36-year old Algerian lecturer from the post-independence generation explains what Gillo Pontecorvo’s film means to him.
Cinematic representations of the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation frequently invoke The Battle of Algiers as a point of reference. This reflects a long history of Palestinian identification with the Algerian independence movement and more specifically with Pontecorvo’s film.
What the Islamist terrorist threat has become is an incoherent pretext to intervene militarily on the part of the west. The only principled position to adopt therefore is the rejection of both, for the self-determination and sovereignty of the peoples.
