Algérie, histoires à ne pas dire... Le film choc interdit en Algérie. Scénario - réactions - polémiques

PREFACE BY BOUALEM SANSAL

In 1962, Algeria became independent. Almost all non-Muslims left Algeria: one of the most significant population displacements in the history of humanity.

Why did Algeria fail to be so fraternal? Had cohabitation with Muslims been impossible there? Was this sad end only the result of panic and the extreme violence at the end of the war?

Four Algerians in search of the truth revisit the founding myths of the new Algeria and the hidden crimes of this "war of liberation," which was also a war of ethnic cleansing against the non-Muslim population:

• The massacres at El Halia (Philippeville) on August 20, 1955
• The bombings and the Battle of Algiers (1956–1957)
• The assassination of the Jewish singer Raymond Leyris in Constantine on June 22, 1961
• The massacres in Oran on July 5, 1962

"The words spoken there, free, moving, restless, and tossed about by history or by often painful reunions reviving family wounds, these words are essential. We do not often have the opportunity or the chance to hear them coming from Algeria. This is what makes Jean-Pierre Lledo's film so valuable and important; it must be seen at all costs." (Serge Toubiana, Director of the French Cinémathèque)

JEAN-PIERRE LLEDO was born in 1947 in Tlemcen. He has been Algerian since the 6th century BCE through his Jewish maternal ancestors, and since 1848 through his Catalan paternal ancestors. Following Islamist threats, Jean-Pierre Lledo had to leave Algeria in 1993. Since then, he has directed several documentary films related to the multiethnic realities of pre-1962 Algeria, memories repressed by official history.