Rachid Bouchareb Research Articles

Hors-la-loi by Rachid Bouchareb

hijab. “We don’t know who is killing who,” they lament. Shortly thereafter in one of the film’s few violent scenes, men empty out of cars at a construction site shooting and slitting the throats of Croatian immigrant workers. When the authorities bring the news of the slaughter to the monastery, they strongly encourage the monks to accept their armed protection. Though visibly shaken, the monks refuse the offer. For the rest of the film, we follow each monk in his struggle to decide whether to stay or to leave the monastery. Ultimately, all decide to stay and all but two are killed, beheaded presumably by a terrorist group. Based on the true story of the Tibhirine monks who were abducted and murdered in Algeria in 1996 as the civil war was raging there, the film is not about really about the then current political situation in Algeria in which Algerian citizens could not be sure if Islamist fundamentalists or the military or government officials were responsible for the horrendous acts of violence being visited upon them. What is suggested in Des hommes et des dieux is that the fundamentalists, the military and the government all want the monks out of Algeria, probably because of the peaceful relationship the monks have been able to forge with the Muslim locals. What is also suggested is that the locals desperately want the monks to stay as these latter represent their only source of protection. As one local woman points out, the monks can choose to stay or to leave, but the locals have no such choice. And as one of the monks points out, staying is as crazy as becoming a monk was in the first place, but the fact is, in choosing to become monks, they’ve already accepted where God has brought them, so staying is the only real choice to make. Where God has brought them, one monk acknowledges , is partly due to where colonization has brought France. He writes: “I know I am an accomplice of the evil that will kill me.” In a way, Des hommes et des dieux constitutes an important examination of deep faith on the parts of both Christians and Muslims, and the need for forgiveness on the part of the French, communicated in a very quiet, thought-provoking, yet nonjudgmental way. Perhaps this explains the film’s immense popularity. Union College (NY) Michelle Chilcoat BOUCHAREB, RACHID, réal. Hors-la-loi. Int. Jamel Debbouze, Roschdy Zem, Sami Bouajila, Chafia Boudraa, Bernard Blancan. Tessalit, 2010. Four years after Indigènes (2006), Rachid Bouchareb returned with yet another tale of Franco-Algerian history. His latest feature, Hors-la-loi, covers the period 1945–62 and tells the story of Algerian people caught in a turning point of history . The film opens with a family that lost its land in 1925, then moves on to the tragic events of Sétif in 1945. While the French people demonstrated and celebrated their newly acquired freedom following the victory over Nazi Germany, locals in Algeria also demonstrated to claim independence. Later, in the Paris area, the three brothers, Abdelkader, Messaoud, and Saïd, became involved in the Algerian war, willingly or not. In Algeria as well as France, the mother, the sisters, and the neighbors were all affected by the events. No one could avoid the conflict. In the shantytown of Nanterre, families tried to survive in extreme conditions while the men got themselves organized. The FLN, MNA, and French police waged war on both lands at great human cost. Produced with considerable technical and financial means, Hors-la-loi was Reviews 613 partly financed by the Algerian and French governments, even though it dealt with extremely painful historical events shared by both nations. An interview of Rachid Bouchareb—an interesting DVD bonus—clarifies a couple of points. His primary goal was to entertain while exploring past events that touched him and his family closely. Much historical research and many interviews of knowledgeable natives were the basis for the story. However, the theme also offered him the opportunity to focus on the art of filmmaking—dialogues, decor, sound, makeup , etc., and Hors-la-loi is a work...

Le Film Indigènes et le Modèle Républicain

The film Indigènes (2006) by Rachid Bouchareb, featuring prominent North African actors Jamal Debbouze, Samy Naciri, Sami Bouajila and Roschdy Zem, offers an original reading of the World War II liberation from the Nazis (1943–45) and shows an important moment in immigration history, the contribution of North African soldiers in the liberation of the homeland. This article focuses on the importance of the film in the current political conjuncture in France, showing how it participated in the rewriting of the republic’s history in proposing a historical alternative to the dominant discourse. The film contributes to redefining the impact of a new generation of North Africans on the development of cinema in France by putting into perspective an important moment forgotten by official historiography. Indigènes also participates in the reappropriation of a collective memory and contributes to the development of a universal body of knowledge. It allows actors of a new generation of French people of African origin to move from the periphery towards the centre of symbolic representation by decoding and delegitimizing a number of stereotypes about citizens of North African descent.

Face to face with the Muslim “Other”

The bombings on March 11, 2004 in Madrid and on July 7, 2005 in London brought terror to the heart of Europe and amplified the feelings of fear, disbelief and suspicion developed as a consequence of 9/11 trauma. This article departs from Hollywood discourses on international terrorism to investigate how European cinema reflected upon these tragedies. Focusing on the films Fremder Freund (The Friend, Elmar Fischer, 2003)and London River (Rachid Bouchareb, 2009), it outlines the peculiarities of European cinema in dealing with international terrorism and thus analyses the representation of Islamic fundamentalism and more generally, Muslim communities. The films stimulate the public debate about contemporary society and the role of British and German institutions in developing “home-grown” terrorists. The article argues that these films avoid any explicit attempts of commemorating and memorialising these tragic events, but they contextualise the attacks engaging with issues of multiculturalism rather than commenting on the problem of international crime and terrorism.

After Deaths, After-Lives

From the beginning of this century, French public discussions have returned frequently – and with impressive intensity – to questions involving the country's colonial past. Angry political debates, numerous novels, front-page media coverage, films including such landmark features as Rachid Bouchareb's ‘Days of Glory’ (2006) and, most brilliantly, Michael Haneke's ‘Caché’ (2005), and even scholarly productions have contributed to this phenomenon. The ‘events’ of fall 2005 were more significant than any of these, in terms of participation, media echo and political, intellectual and social consequences, leading some English-language newspapers to write of ‘France in Flames’ and others to speak of a ‘French Intifada’, or a ‘Muslim uprising’ in the banlieue, France's housing-project rich (but otherwise dramatically underserved) suburbs. As the keystone of its response, the government of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin dug up a 1955 law passed during the Algerian War to impose a curfew. It seemed to many that continuities between the present and the colonial past had finally ended what some dub the ‘colonial fracture’: that, is the contemporary French propensity to erase all references to its overseas foundation and, thus, to avoid thinking about the contributions that the sacrifices and suffering of its colonial subjects have made to the country's present.

Indigènes: A Sign of the Times

Although it deals primarily with events that happened sixty years ago, Rachid Bouchareb's film Indigenes (2006) is in every sense a sign of the times. The movie could not have been funded without the meteoric rise of its most prominent star, Jamel Debbouze, whose popularity was also crucial in ensuring the film's box office success. In addition, Indigenes capitalized upon and helped to influence major public debates within France about the nation's colonial past and contemporary postcolonial immigrant minorit ies. In highlighting the role played by North African colonial troops in the liberation of France during World War II, the movie helped to persuade President Chirac to end a long-standing injustice whereby veterans in former colonies have been receiving lower pensions than their former comrades in arms in France. The promotion of Indigenes was also used to press the case for fairer treatment of African immigrant minorities in contemporary France.

Days of Glory / Flanders: Emma Wilson on Two Prize-winning, Politically Ambitious French War Films

ABSTRACT Though the two films seem rather different—Bruno Dumont's Flanders dealing with an imaginary contemporary war, Rachid Bouchareb's Days of Glory concerned with forgotten incidents in World War II—the argument of this essay is that they share a sense, somewhat unusual among recent French filmmakers, of the political power of cinema.

Days of Glory? Veterans, reparation and national memory

Rachid Bouchareb's 2006 film Indignes/Days of Glory claims a place for the forgotten soldiers of the Second World War, and explores both the role played by indigenous troops in the Liberation of France and their status within the French army. The film forced a change in France's financial policy towards its veterans of indigenous origin, and inscribes itself within a strong trend of memory-activism in France which seeks to establish a more truthful and inclusive version of the nation's past. The film's British release has been instrumental in highlighting the injustices suffered by the Gurkhas.