Malik Lakhdar-Hamina

A small town in Algeria, in the years 1960-1962. Two young idle boys and rock fans, Boualem and Salah, try to survive in the turmoil of war, taking great care not to get involved.

The story of a family in the instability and violence that shook Algeria during the riots of October 1988 in the midst of the rise of fundamentalism and intolerance, disappointments and prohibitions, corruption, nepotism and abuse of power. On October 5, 1988, young Algerians occupied the streets... Afterwards, Algeria would plunge into the chaos of the Black Decade which would last more than ten years and leave more than 150,000 dead.

In Algiers, during the Algerian War of Independence, one of the leaders of the FLN was arrested by the French colonial army, which used the most violent methods to make the prisoners speak. The use of torture poses a conscience problem for a French officer. Playing shot-reverse-shot, between the tortured and his torturer, in a suffocating camera, Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina approaches torture by drawing inspiration from the story of his father, who died of abuse.