On November 1, 1954, near Ghassira, a village lost in the Aurès Mountains, a French teacher, his wife and a local governor became the first civilian victims of a seven-year war that would lead to the independence of Algeria. More than 50 years on, Malek Bensmail returned to this Shaoui village, which had become “the cradle of the Algerian Revolution,” and spent the seasons there filming its inhabitants, its school and its children. Balanced between the present and the collective past, the film captures an Algerian reality in all its profoundly human, contradictory complexity.
Jean-Philippe Tessé