Beloved of revolutionaries and those who study counter-insurgency alike, the film has stirred up discussion and controversy ever since its initial release. Rumors are that the Irish Republican Army studied it, and the Pentagon is known to have screened it just prior to the invasion of Iraq.
Banned in France for five years after its initial release, the film was hailed as a masterpiece of Italian neo-realism. What was lesser known was that it also marked that start of the Algerian national film industry, one of the most prolific in the post-Independence Arab world.
Although, as the original U. And well it should, based as it is on the memoirs of Algerian resistance fighter Saadi Yacef also in the film , interviews with French troops who fought in Algeria, in addition to the the memories of the people of Algiers themselves. The film opens with French paratroopers torturing an Algerian fighter to get him to reveal the location of resistance leader, Ali La Pointe and several others, crouching in a hiding space in a wall.
They are the last of the resistance cells and have only seconds to decide if they will give themselves up or be blown to pieces with the rest of the building. From there, the story flashes back to follow Ali La Pointe a dynamic turn by non-actor Brahim Haggiag , a young hustler who joins the resistance after seeing the French guillotine an Algerian nationalist in jail, and the more polished National Liberation Front FLN leader, Djafar Saadi Yacef playing a version of himself as the FLN steps up resistance to the year occupation.
The setting is Algiers, the capital of French Algeria; the time, between , when Algerians, tired of asking for independence, decide to demand it in one of the most important acts of resistance during the Algerian war.
