Honorary premiere of the feature film “Our Brothers” – Al-Hiwar Al-Jazairia

Yesterday, Friday evening, in Algiers, the Algerian feature film “Our Brothers” by Rachid Bouchareb was presented in its first honorable screening in Algeria. It is a dramatic work dealing with the issue of racism and discrimination in France against the children of immigrants of Algerian and Maghreb origin.
This work, produced in 2020 and based on real events, deals with the story of the Algerians Malik Oskin and Abdel Ben Yahya, who were brutally killed during a demonstration of French students in the French capital, Paris, in 1986, as their killing caused outrage in French society and the Algerian and Maghreb community there.
The film mainly revolves around the murder of student Malik Oskin (22 years old), who is the most present, as the French police ended his life on the sixth of December while suppressing a student demonstration against a proposed government law to reform the university, during which he was brutally beaten and kicked to die even before he reached the hospital. On the other hand, Abd al-Ben Yahya (20 years old) was also killed by a “drunk” police chief.
The film highlights how the French authorities have worked to minimize the killing of the two young men and not condemn the barbaric behavior of the police, had it not been for the great action of the associations and the lawyers of the two victims, which forced them to intervene in order to calm the situation, in addition to canceling the proposal for the university reform law, and although two policemen were convicted in this case, their punishment is “ It wasn’t fair,” according to the work.
The script for this 92-minute film was written by the Algerian director and novelist Kawthar Azimi, and it stars Reda Kateb (Mohamed) and Lina Khoudri (Sarah) in the role of my brother Malik, and Samir Qassemi in the role of Abdul’s father, as well as Raphael Persomaz in the role of the police inspector. Daniel Matti” and “Adam Amara” in the role of Malik Oskin, and other artists.
In his work, Bouchareb relied on condensing the archives through the use of old tapes documenting that crime, some of which expressed the interventions of senior French politicians at the time, such as President François Mitterrand and Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, as well as the demonstrations that swept Paris to condemn these two crimes and to commemorate them in light of the mounting anger among members of the community. Algerian and Maghreb in France.
This work was presented at its honorable premiere at the Cannes International Film Festival in France in 2022, and it was recently chosen to represent Algeria in the 2023 Oscars competition.
Bouchareb, who attended the show with a number of actors, said that his film “combines imagination and archives, as well as sheds light on the French political discourse at that time,” adding that it is “his third long fictional work dealing with the issue of relations between Algeria and France after “The Andijan” (The Andijan) ( 2006) and Outlaws (2010).
Rachid Bouchareb, born in Paris in 1953, is a Franco-Algerian director and producer. He began his career as an assistant director on French television from 1977 to 1984, during which he made several short films, before producing his first feature film in 1985 entitled “The Red Stick” to present after that. Other works such as “Little Senegal” (2001) and “The Dust of Life” (1995).
Bouchareb also worked on opening up to international cinema, so he moved to Hollywood in the United States of America, where he completed “London River” (2009) as well as “The Enemy’s Road” (2014), which was co-starred by the American actor Forest Whitaker, and he collaborated in writing scripts for some of his films with a number of writers. Algerians like Azimi and Yasmina Khadra.
The film “Our Brothers” was presented within the framework of the 11th edition of the Algiers International Film Festival dedicated to the committed film (FICA), whose activities will conclude on Saturday evening with the distribution of prizes to the winners of this edition.