The film focuses on the feeling of abandonment of young Algerians, arranged alongside the French army.
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Philippe Faucon may be tackled the most thorny questions of the national debate, immigration, discrimination, postcolonialism, etc., the filmmaker never signs works on subject. He does cinema, often with non-professional, looking with them something unique, from the inside, likely to be brought to the screen. This patient work reveals sensitive portraits of characters that the company often erases behind categories: adolescents from the northern neighborhoods (Samia, 2000), young radicalized (La Disintegration, 2011), a cleaning lady (Fatima, 2015), a site worker (Amin, 2018)…
After the betrayal (2005), chronicle of the disillusionment of a French lieutenant during the Algerian war (1954-1962), Philippe Faucon revisited the last years of the conflict with the Harkis, presented at the Directors’ Fortnight: The film explores the feeling of abandonment which seizes Algerian soldiers, engaged alongside the French army. The harkis will find themselves caught in the vice, exposed to the reprisals of the FLN, while negotiations for a cease-fire began and that the independence of Algeria is looming.
Born in 1958 in Oujda, in the northeast of Morocco, son of a soldier, Philippe Faucon has a personal history with this conflict which still arouses virulent debates, also little documented in the cinema – let us quote, among others, the little one Soldier (1963), by Jean-Luc Godard, or being 20 years old in the Aurès (1972), by René Vautier. By working on the harkis, Philippe Faucon kept in mind this sentence pronounced by a man who lived this tragedy: “The page of the Algerian war must not be torn off, but you have to find it to turn it.”
unsaid and propaganda
The harkis are interested in the complexity of human relations which are tied inside the unit under the command of Lieutenant Pascal (Théo Cholbi). We are in 1959: young men, Salah (Mohamed Mouffok) and Kaddour (Amine Zorgane), leave their village, sometimes their wife and children, to join the French army. They do not really know what awaits them, and the whole story feeds on these unsaid conjugated with propaganda. Philippe Faucon delivers a specific newspaper, dated, of three years of struggle, negotiations and negotiations of the French army, seen since the small contingent, without ever getting lost in the event or the reconstruction of a battle.
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