Safy Boutella

What musical genre can claim to have gone, in the space of fifty years, from a hidden cabaret in Oran to Super Bowl halftime? Born in Algeria at the end of the Second World War, the raï wave spread from the cabarets of western Algeria to the cassette shops of Barbès in Paris, before sweeping the world at the end of the 1980s. its hybridization, the intoxicating music traveled from Algerian and French weddings to the biggest international stages, before suddenly disappearing from the radar at the dawn of the new millennium. Icons that have disappeared, including Cheikha Remitti and Prince Hasni, to young heirs, passing by the star Khaled, the collector Hadj Sameer trace the tumultuous course of this musical genre, between clandestinity, planetary glory and resistance.

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This romantic, political drama is about the reunion of an Algerian woman who abandoned her lover 35 years earlier to live in France, and the lover who chose to stay in Algeria and fight the French colonials.

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The story of a family in the instability and violence that shook Algeria during the riots of October 1988 in the midst of the rise of fundamentalism and intolerance, disappointments and prohibitions, corruption, nepotism and abuse of power. On October 5, 1988, young Algerians occupied the streets... Afterwards, Algeria would plunge into the chaos of the Black Decade which would last more than ten years and leave more than 150,000 dead.

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Salim, a reporter, is having trouble with his wife Nadia. They have lost their passion for each other, and Nadia falls in love with Miloud, Salim's driver. Miloud then murders his boss.

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A drama set a little before the 1920s, in which scattered news, stories and rumors spread the presence of a new wealth, oil, leading to the suspicion that a great change was about to take place.

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Since childhood, Qays and Layla have been in love. Qays, being a poet, publicly sings of his love, crying it out joyously far and wide - just the sort of public proclamation which was strictly condemned at the time. Distraught yet fearless, Qays stubbornly proclaims with all the more vigor his love for Layla, who remains entrapped by her own clan.

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This film, is about the courage and the determination of a young woman in djurdjur"as mountain in Algeria, fighting for her ancestor land during the earlier years of french occupation.

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Nadia, an 18-year-old French girl from Moroccan origin, is now of age to get married. Despite her reluctance to marriage during the family summer vacation in Morocco, she finally chooses Samir.

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Ali is a young Egyptian screenwriter determined to succeed in London, where he has been a student. He loves the artistic and political freedom, the colours, the music, the individualism. But he has little money, his student visa is about to expire and he has been thrown out of his lodgings. And so Ali moves in with a succession of eccentric and colourful London flatmates: Mark, a photographer with a very individual style, Linda, a young, blonde, very sexy model and Marilyn Monroe impersonator, and Miss Stevenson who is convinced that Ali is the reincarnation of her long dead Egyptian lover.

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Fascinated by the history of his people, Alloune, an old guide at the African museum "La Maison des Esclaves" in Gorée, sets off on a pilgrimage to find the descendants of his ancestors in the United States. This moving journey takes him from the coast of South Carolina to the Harlem neighborhood of Little Senegal, home to the African community. Driven by the idea of reuniting his family across centuries and borders, Alloune traces his roots to a distant cousin, Ida, who knows nothing of his past. The old man also crosses paths with his nephew Hassan, a clandestine cab driver, his fiancée Biram, Eileen, pregnant and a runaway, and Karim, who is seeking a sham marriage to obtain a green card. All four misunderstand Alloune's quest.

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