Even before Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers premiered at the Venice Film Festival on August 31, 1966, the film had generated a lot of buzz. The jury presided over by Italian writer Giorgio Bassani gave the film the Golden Lion, the main award of the festival, “for the courage with which it tackled such a difficult and highly controversial historical and political issue, or for the vigor with which it was able to master such a subject.” Beyond the praise, the film was also met with various polemics, which continued well after its release.

The French government’s delegation to Venice refused to attend both the screening and the award ceremony at the end of the festival because, in the words of its head representative (civil servant and author Philippe Erlanger), “we interpret the inclusion of the film in the festival as a sign of hostility toward France.” French film critics — who as always flooded the Italian city for the festival, as they represented the largest group of foreign journalists — did see the film but largely did not speak of it favorably: to mention just one, in Le Monde Yvonne Baby wrote how “Gillo Pontecorvo made the mistake of emphasizing — with irritating intensity (to which the music contributes greatly) — the heroism of the Algerian fighters, and of constantly filming, in close-ups and in a tragic twilight, tense, pained faces whose expressions. . . .  evoke no emotion whatsoever.” France was not ready to talk about the Algerian war just four years after the humiliating withdrawal from the North African country.

But what is Pontecorvo’s film about, and why does it still make sense to talk about it sixty years later?