Djinn

Your untangled hair hides a 7 year war. Cross-look of three women engaged alongside the FLN on colonization and the Algerian war of independence. They will know the clandestine, the prison, the torture, the psychiatric hospital. It is at the twilight of their lives that they choose to testify, after decades of silence. With clarity and modesty, they tell the story of colonial Algeria, segregation, racism, anti-Semitism, prison, torture, solidarity, freedom and also the nature that invigorates, soothing landscapes, music and poetry that allow the breakaway .

By meeting his former comrades in combat, the film follows the journey of Yves Mathieu, anti-colonialist in Black Africa then lawyer for the FLN. When Algeria became independent, he drafted the Decrees of March on vacant property and self-management, promulgated in 1963 by Ahmed Ben Bella. Yves Mathieu's life is punctuated by his commitments in an Algeria that was then called "The Lighthouse of the Third World". The director, who is his daughter, returns to the conditions of his death in 1966.

In this film, four key witnesses, who live in Algeria today, as full-fledged Agerians, show us what this colonization was really like, so "beneficial" that they themselves perceived it as the oppression of one people by another. Three of them, who today would be called "pieds noirs," in other words, those Europeans to whom France, the occupying power, gave the best land, taken from the indigenous populations, work, and exclusive rights, not shared by the entire population, lived rather well compared to the majority of the "natives." The fourth was far from all that and lived in Argentina. Annie Steiner, Felix Colozzi, Pierre Chaulet, and Roberto Muniz explain to us what led them to show solidarity with the struggle of the weak, the humiliated, and to risk their freedom and their lives by committing to liberate Algeria.