Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers reconstructs a decisive period in Algeria’s struggle for independence from French colonial rule. Centred on the conflict between the National Liberation Front and the French military, the film follows the escalating cycle of resistance, bombing, surveillance, torture and retaliation that transformed Algiers into a battleground.
Shot in grainy black and white with a largely non-professional cast, the film carries the immediacy of news footage. Yet its extraordinary realism is the result of precise staging, editing and sound. Pontecorvo refuses the comfort of simple heroes and villains, examining how systems of occupation and political violence shape the choices of everyone caught within them.
The film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1966, was banned in France for five years, and was screened at the Pentagon as recently as 2003 under the title “How to Win a Battle Against Terrorism and Lose the War of Ideas.”
