Abdelkrim Bahloul

A family comedy about arranged marriage

December 1994. On Saturday 24th, four GIA terrorists hijack an Air France A300 Airbus, bound for Paris, with 227 passengers on board, at the Algiers airport.

Yamakasi - Les samouraïs des temps modernes is a 2001 French movie written by Luc Besson. It demonstrates the skills of the Yamakasi, a group of traceurs who battle against injustice in the Paris ghetto. They use parkour to steal from the rich in order to pay off medical bills for a kid injured copying their techniques.

When the War of Independence ends, a widow must find a roof for her six children. Luckily, a Frenchman about to leave offers her the house he is about to vacate. But a high-placed local bureaucrat does not agree to such a gift. After losing all hope of obtaining the property due to the bias of the local authorities, she decides to go to the capital with her children to speak to the president of the Republic.

Salim arrives in France, happy like a hummingbird at the idea of joining again with Sofia, a young French woman of Moroccan descent whom he married there according to the country tradition. But he quickly becomes disillusioned when she tells him she no longer wants to be his wife. Here in France she is free and nobody can force her. Between brothers and sisters who support Sofia, a disoriented Salim who wants to return to Morocco, and parents who would like him to build a new life in France, with or without Sofia, the situation is intractable. Marriage Blues, a bittersweet comedy, is thumbing its nose at the arranged marriage.

Dahmane is a wealthy and educated man who lives alone with his horse. One day, he takes in Jennia, a beautiful woman who turns out to be a spirit. The childless Dahmane adopts her and refuses to release her. However, his neighbour discovers his secret and threatens to reveal it unless Dahmane brings the neighbour's wayward son back home.

Compelled by grief and curiosity a young Englishman travels to France where he meets an eccentric older woman and unearths truths about the father he never really knew and about himself.

1972, in the south of France, deep in the forest, a family with meager luggage discovers the new camp where they will live. Despite the camp leader's overt paternalism, the Harkis lead a difficult life without real freedom. A life of poverty and guardianship that Leila, the Benamars' eldest daughter, rejects. She is at the age of rebellion, and also of her first love. For her, her father, Saïd, scarred by war and exile, accustomed to giving in, owes nothing to the French who enlisted him in the French army, then failed to protect them in Algeria. Thanks to her, with the help of a peasant couple, he will raise his head and the Benamars will leave the camp for a nearby farm.

A promising kickboxer struggles to resist the temptations of a life of crime.

At long last, the two Hamlet sisters are allowed to go to Paris by themselves, and the discotheque they have heard about beckons. When the driver for their ride home becomes too drunk to drive, they cannot reach their mother by phone, and it is too late to take the last train back to where they live, they are stranded in town. The girls, who are themselves partly of Algerian descent, are accosted by a disreputable looking older Algerian immigrant, who tries to give them cash so that they can take a taxi back to their homes. They are afraid of him and try to get away from him. He apparently accepts this, but trails them without calling attention to himself. It is good that he does, for they soon run into real trouble, and then they find out that despite his frightening appearance, he means them well.

The poet Jean Sénac, also a radio host, chose to stay in Algeria after his country's independence in 1962. Ten years later, a protester and libertarian, he was monitored by the regime's police. His poems attract a popular audience and his show is a real success with young people. Also, when Hamid and Belkacem, two students, learn that the play they wrote and presented at the first national Algerian theater festival is downgraded under the pretext that they performed it in French, their pain will be alleviated by the presence behind the scenes by Jean Sénac who congratulates them. The latter will become close friends of the poet and witness his fight for the freedom and culture of Algerian youth. A fight which would lead Sénac to martyrdom: one night in August 1973, he was assassinated in the cellar which served as his apartment. Hamid is accused of the murder.

Worker or poker player, Samir and Xavier live from day to day. Bright young woman and future bride, Liza has a future all traced. They and she find themselves by chance for a weekend for a stay as unlikely as initiative.

Is Nosfer Arbi a vampire? Or is he just a very emaciated, very strange and possibly quite lonely young man from an Arabic country with an obsession with death? On the other hand, why is the previously cheery Parisian teenager Nathalie Belfond throwing fits and speaking in Arabic? Her strange behavior began with the appearance of a caped and cadaverous man outside her window. Mr. & Mrs. Belfond have their hands full trying to sort this mess out, in this extremely unusual and award-winning comedy which puts a new wrinkle on the vampire mythos.

A young Algerian in Paris has not been as successful as he claims in letters home, and when his mother unexpectedly arrives for a visit of several months, he is hard put to hide his circumstances -- and the fact that he has resorted to small-time criminal activity to support himself. His mother disembarks in her traditional attire, a warm-hearted woman who does not have a clue as to how this foreign society functions but also has absolutely no inhibitions about finding out, if the need arises. As the story progresses, the mother catches on to her son's circumstances though the two are still not able to confront the deception and right it. Even with a low budget, this first-time feature-length story by Bahloul Bahloul combines satire, comedy, and pathos to bring home a relationship between mother and son that transcends life's many obstacles.

Mr. Slimami is an Algerian retiree living in Paris who witnesses a murder while taking a walk one evening. He's spotted by the assailant, but Slimami manages to slip away before being caught. The victim turned out to be a prominent businessman, and police are soon searching for the witness as well as the killers. Slimami does not want to step forward, both as a matter of personal safety and because he prefers to let the French police handle their own affairs. His son Alilou, a budding journalist, openly decries the failure of the witness to come forward as a black mark on the Muslim community in Paris, unaware that the man in question is his father.

After a conviction for theft, Merwan was expelled from France, where he had lived since the age of one, to Algeria, his country of birth. In a foreign country of which he knows neither the language nor the customs, he finds himself stripped of his belongings and on the street.