The birth of Algerian cinema is closely linked with the struggle against French colonialism. From the beginning of the insurrection in November 1954, orchestrated by the National Liberation Front (FLN), to independence in July 1962, the war caused at least 1.5 million deaths on both sides — there is a long and extenuating debate over the exact figures. It had a vast echo in Europe and beyond, partly because of the use of torture by French troops. Though some footage from the war circulated in the West, including on newsreels, these images were carefully curated and for the most part excluded any documentary evidence of French atrocities like torture and the use of napalm.

The scandal caused by the publication of a set of such photos in the French magazine L’Express as early as 1955 shows how ambivalent the French public was with regard to the colonial presence in Africa. As Emma Kuby has noted, the images by no means came “to serve as iconic representations of the Algerian war”; though they “successfully provoke[d] a collective response of horror and shame,” they weren’t enough to change the terms of political debate. Insofar as there were French films made during and about the war — as was the case with, among others, Le petit soldat (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963), Muriel (Alain Resnais, 1963) and Adieu Philippine (Jacques Rozier, 1962) — they were either plainly censored or the release date was delayed. That said, some images of the war did circulate in France in what has been called the cinéma parallèle, a sort of alternative and clandestine distribution system.

The war in Algeria, for a long time denied and reduced by the French authorities to some “events” (événements), was also a war of images — one where images served as weapons. Like the French, Algerians, too, started to develop their own set of images for circulation during the war. It is now accepted that “cinema was born out of the war of liberation and made to serve it,” as Hala Salmane wrote in Algerian Cinema, published by the British Film Institute in 1976. How did it serve this war of liberation? In large part, the mission of the first years of Algerian cinema was to show that a war was going on and to counter the French narrative about the war. This was a national narrative, but it is important to emphasize that it was influenced by ideas and people coming from abroad, many of whom had been inspired by Algeria’s liberation struggle and opted to go and participate. This solidarity, internationalism and Third-Worldism were foundational to Algerian cinema in its early stages, and helped to shape the country’s cinema to come.