u/EditorRedditer

One of my 'eat yer greens' movie choices. Not something I would pick for 'entertainment' but because I have heard that it is an important work.

The story deals with Algeria’s struggle for independence from 130 years of French control, whilst the French (recently defeated in Indo-China) had something to prove, regarding maintaining their colonial ambitions.

It was an extraordinary film and operated at a level of deep intimacy and wide-scale political event. The French started treating the Algerians in the same way that they had been treated by the Nazis only ten years earlier (round-ups, false imprisonment, torture) but they had forgotten what that was like, even whilst insisting that they had not.

There was brutality on both sides (no ‘good guys’ in this movie) and the beautifully-filmed hyper-realistic re-creations of riot, raid, bomb attack, and their aftermath, were so well done that, on occasion, it almost became too painful and distressing to watch.

The parallels between the Algerian struggle and the present-day Gaza conflict were undeniable, with the French as the IDF and the Algerians as the Palestinians. This was the real tragedy for me - have we really learned so little as a society in the 70-odd years since then…?

https://preview.redd.it/vvpyy2x7zo0h1.jpg?width=410&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b1089019e14eaa5833c8ccd9233cd4779fe2f0e1

The Guardian called it a ‘masterpiece’. It was.