Pak Sahafat – “Our Brothers” is a feature film that criticizes France for its racist policy against Algerians.
According to Pak Sahafat News Agency, from the official newspaper of Al-Shaab, the feature film “Our Brothers” by the famous Algerian director Rashid Bousharb had its first honorary screening on Friday night in the city of Al-Jazeera, the capital of Algeria.
This film is a dramatic work that deals with the racism and racial discrimination of the French government against Algerian and Moroccan immigrants.
“Our Brothers” is a 2020 product and is based on true events and is related to the story of two Algerian youths named “Malik Oskin” and “Abd al-Ben Yahya” who were brutally murdered in 1986 during the protests of French students as well as the Algerian and Moroccan immigrants living in this country.
The film mostly revolves around the murder of 22-year-old student Malik Oskin, who was killed by French police on December 6 during the suppression of student protests against the government’s proposed university reform law. He was so brutally punched and kicked by the police that he died before reaching the hospital. 20-year-old Abdul Bin Yahya was also killed by a “drunk” police commander during the same demonstration.
The film shows how the French authorities at the time tried to marginalize the murder of this young man and the brutal treatment of the police and did not condemn the brutal treatment of the police but the actions of trade unions as well as the lawyers of the two victims forced them to calm down the situation, in addition to announcing the cancellation of the university reform law proposal, to enter into the issue of these crimes. Although two policemen were convicted in this case, according to what the film narrates, this punishment was not “fair”.
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The continuation of the report of Al-Shaab newspaper indicates: the script of this 92-minute film is the joint work of the director and the Algerian novelist Kotsar Azimi. In this work, Boucharb has tried to rely heavily on the archive, and in this regard, he has used old documentary videos about this crime. In these video files, the interventions of senior politicians such as President Francois Mitterrand and then Prime Minister Jacques Chirac are identified in these events, events that caused the anger of Algerians and North Africans living in France to peak, and Paris was also the scene demonstration to condemn these two crimes and commemorate these two young victims.
“Our Brothers” previously had its honorary premiere at the Cannes International Film Festival in France in 2022 and was recently chosen to represent Algeria at the 2023 Oscars.
Rashid Boucharb, the French-Algerian director and producer of this film, who was present at the ceremony along with a number of actors, said that this work is a combination of imagination and reality, and one of its characteristics is that it replaces the discourse of the French authorities at that time.
“Our Brothers” is Boucharb’s third work after “Andijan” (2006) and Lawbreakers (2010) on the issue of Algerian-French relations.
Bouchard was born in Paris in 1953. From 1977 to 1984, he worked as an assistant director in French television, during which he made several short films and his first feature film in 1985, titled “Red Sticks”, then “Little Senegal” (2001) and “Dust”. Made Life” (1995).
The film “Our Brothers” was presented in the framework of the 11th edition of the Algerian International Film Festival for the Committed Film (Fika), which will end this evening (Saturday) with the awarding of prizes to the winners.
Algeria was under the occupation and colonization of France for 132 years (1830 to 1962), during which more than one million Algerian civilians were killed by the French invaders, and according to this, Algerians named their country “Bald Million Shahid”, the country of one million.
Testing the first French nuclear bomb in the Algerian desert with the planned placement of human samples among the ignorant and innocent Algerian natives to study the extent of radiation damage to humans is considered one of the other crimes of French colonialism in Algeria.