Hors la loi

Credits

Name: Hors la loi

Country: Algerien; Frankriech

Year of publication: 2010

Format: Blu-ray

Color: color

Language : OF m. dt. UT

Duration: 137 Minuten

Direction: Bouchareb, Rachid

Screenplay: Bouchareb, Rachid

Camera: Beaucarne, Christophe

Editing: Kergoat, Yannick

Sound: Bernard, Thomas; Engels, Marc

Actor: Debbouze, Jamel; Zem, Roschdy; Bouajila, Sami

Abstract

With his latest feature film Outside the law, which was in competition at Cannes in 2010, RachidBouchareb continues his cinematic reworking of French colonial history. With many of the same cast and crew (including Jamel Debbouze, Roschdy Zem, Sami Bouajila) as in his war drama Indigènes (Days of glory, about North African colonial soldiers in World War II) he tells the story of three brothers and their different behaviours in the Algerian War of Independence. Having lost their land to the French settlers, one of the brothers takes revenge on an Algerian who collaborates with the colonial rulers. The second brother goes to fight in the Vietnam war with the French troops. And the third ends up in a French prison for having worked for the Algerian independence movement.
At some point the three brothers meet up again in one of the "bidonvilles" which existed for North African immigrants in France in the 1950s. They become embroiled in the fighting between factions of Algerians in exile, extorting revolutionary tax and murdering those who do not share their views. If Bouchareb`s representation of the conflicts between the independence movement FLN and the followers of the nationalist MessaliHadj made him unpopular in Algeria, in France, revolutionaries threatened to attack the festival cinema in Cannes because of the alleged vilification of French history.