Safy Boutella

What musical genre can claim to have gone, in the space of fifty years, from a hidden cabaret in Oran to Super Bowl halftime? Born in Algeria at the end of the Second World War, the raï wave spread from the cabarets of western Algeria to the cassette shops of Barbès in Paris, before sweeping the world at the end of the 1980s. its hybridization, the intoxicating music traveled from Algerian and French weddings to the biggest international stages, before suddenly disappearing from the radar at the dawn of the new millennium. Icons that have disappeared, including Cheikha Remitti and Prince Hasni, to young heirs, passing by the star Khaled, the collector Hadj Sameer trace the tumultuous course of this musical genre, between clandestinity, planetary glory and resistance.

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.

This romantic, political drama is about the reunion of an Algerian woman who abandoned her lover 35 years earlier to live in France, and the lover who chose to stay in Algeria and fight the French colonials.

Salim, a reporter, is having trouble with his wife Nadia. They have lost their passion for each other, and Nadia falls in love with Miloud, Salim's driver. Miloud then murders his boss.

Since childhood, Qays and Layla have been in love. Qays, being a poet, publicly sings of his love, crying it out joyously far and wide - just the sort of public proclamation which was strictly condemned at the time. Distraught yet fearless, Qays stubbornly proclaims with all the more vigor his love for Layla, who remains entrapped by her own clan.

A drama set a little before the 1920s, in which scattered news, stories and rumors spread the presence of a new wealth, oil, leading to the suspicion that a great change was about to take place.

What musical genre can claim to have gone, in the space of fifty years, from a hidden cabaret in Oran to Super Bowl halftime? Born in Algeria at the end of the Second World War, the raï wave spread from the cabarets of western Algeria to the cassette shops of Barbès in Paris, before sweeping the world at the end of the 1980s. its hybridization, the intoxicating music traveled from Algerian and French weddings to the biggest international stages, before suddenly disappearing from the radar at the dawn of the new millennium. Icons that have disappeared, including Cheikha Remitti and Prince Hasni, to young heirs, passing by the star Khaled, the collector Hadj Sameer trace the tumultuous course of this musical genre, between clandestinity, planetary glory and resistance.