No, Waqai sanawat al-djamr is not a Hollywood movie: what we disapprove of Hollywood cinema is not its spectacular quality, but the fact that it manipulates emotions, creates fictitious universes and it distils a flawed ideology (among other things). This is certainly not the case with Lakhdar Hamina’s film. We have a great need for anti-imperialist films to reply to the innumerable lies of imperialist films […]

No, Waqai sanawat al-djamr is not, as someone said lately, a politically moderate film. Nor is it correct to say that “this is a film that spare the French”, quite the opposite, what can be objected is that colonial society is more complex than it is represented here, however, that was not the purpose of the film. Hamina shows the Europeans as ‘we’ showed Native Americans or third world citizens in ‘our films’: from a distance. And if this film serves to bring France (once Giscardian) closer to Algeria, so much the better, since it’s clear that it does go to the detriment of the latter. If the official France believed that it was clever to award this film in Cannes, we must take advantage of this contradiction, as it will allow the French to get a clearer idea of what the Algerian people’s liberation war really was.

Guy Hennebelle, “Ecran”, n. 40, 1975

I tried to recount, with dignity and nobility, this uprising that then became the Algerian Revolution, an uprising not only against the coloniser, but against a certain human condition. I wanted to avoid any kind of Manichaean, caricatural and demagogic approach, which risked turning Waqai sanawat al-djamr into a sort of Western; good against evil, Algerians against French. What guided me was the quest for honesty: I looked inside myself for the honesty of a child, the eyes of the child I once was, the memories of my childhood. […] It would be a serious mistake to distinguish Algerian Cinema, the cinema of the Maghreb, from African Cinema. The cinema of the Third World is one – the Arab World, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia – as we share the same motivations, the same difficulties, and a common destiny, on an artistic level and on an expressive level. We have suffered hunger and thirst. We will reclaim our image.

Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina, interviewed by Claude Dupont, “Cahiers de la cinémathèque”,

Summer 1975