Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina obituary: the first Arab and African director to win Cannes’ Palme d’Or

Destiny works in mysterious ways. The iconic Algerian filmmaker Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina died at the age of 91 on 25 May, the day after Cannes celebrated the 50^th anniversary of his masterwork Chronicle of the Years of Fire, the sole Arab and African film to win the Palme d’Or. 

Confining Lakhdar-Hamina’s legacy to that Palme d’Or win would be gravely reductive. Lakhdar-Hamina was not only one of the founders of North African cinema, he was a masterful filmmaker with a national cinematic project that paved a new path for Arab cinema distinct from both French colonization and the dominant Egyptian cinema. 

Born on 26 February in the northern Algerian countryside, Lakhdar-Hamina was raised by a modest family of farmers. He caught the film bug early on, spending a considerable part of his childhood travelling to the nearest city with a cinema and retelling the stories of the movies he watched to his friends back home. 

He studied agriculture in Algeria and law in France. In 1958, the pivotal year of his young life, his father was abducted, tortured, and murdered by the French, propelling him to desert the French army (the French government imposed conscription on Muslim Algerians at the time) and join the National Liberation Front (FLN). The FLN would send him the following year to study cinematography at the renowned film school Famu in Prague as a part of an initiative engineered by the Soviet Union. 

In the succeeding years, and until Algeria gained its independence in 1962, Lakhdar-Hamina directed a number of shorts from his temporary Tunisian exile, which promoted and explained the objectives of the armed resistance while exposing the brutality of the occupying French military. He returned to Algeria in 1962 to preside over the film arm of the first post-independence Algerian government. 

France has long denied Algeria’s pre-colonial nationhood; the nationalists and French-Algeria proponents adhered to the belief that Algeria was nothing more but a cluster of tribes ruled by the Ottoman Empire. For Lakhdar-Hamina and the Algerian film pioneers, establishing a national narrative was key to the post-independence cultural project. 

His style and ideology are evident in his debut feature, The Winds of the Aures (1966), a blazing chronicle of a recent widow (the great stage star Keltoum) who embarks on a doomed journey in search of the son who has been arrested by the French troops. 

Soviet-style wide vistas punctuate the intimate medium shots. The narrative’s pitch and intensity are more restrained than the popular Egyptian films of the time. The Winds of the Aures was unlike anything seen in Arab cinema. Its matter-of-factness, naturalistic performances, and confrontationally anti-colonialist charge caught the west by surprise. The first Algerian feature by an Algerian filmmaker; it was nominated the Palme d’Or and earned Lakhdar-Hamina the Best First Work award – the first prize given to an Arab film in Cannes.

His second feature, Hassan Terro (1968), showed his versatility in tackling diverse genres while exploring new facets of the War of the Independence. It’s a shrewdly-structured black comedy about a timid father who – while striving to avoid being caught up in the pull of the revolution – gets mistaken for a terrorist. Radically different in tone and visuals from the somber Aures, here Lakhdar-Hamina swaps the rural landscapes of his debut for plain interiors whose banality reflect that of the compliant petite bourgeoisie: too middling, too myopic to challenge the status quo. 

Hassan Terro may lack the visual sweep of Lakhdar-Hamina’s better-known epics; but narratively and philosophically, it’s his best-written and most surprising work: a major hit in Algeria that remains unseen outside the Maghreb. 

Equally ambitious was Décembre (1973), a military drama charting the moral crisis of a French officer who starts to question the torture methods sanctioned by his superiors. Featuring an all-star French cast that includes Julien Guiomar and Michel Auclair, Décembre was among the first films to openly discuss the use of unlawful violent interrogations by the French army – a subject that would largely remain taboo in French cinema until Bertrand Tavernier’s documentary La Guerre sans nom in 1992. 

Chronicle of the Years of Fire was Lakhdar-Hamina’s most ambitious production. The most expensive Algerian film of its time, it sidestepped the thorny moral questions of Décembre and Hassan for an epic tale documenting the early years of the revolution from the perspective of a peasant turned resistance fighter and a mad prophet heralding the end of the French occupation. 

Rousing, strikingly framed and magnificently choreographed, Chronicle took a leaf from Youssef Chahine’s equally imposing historical actioner Saladin for a streamlined narrative that emphasizes the mythical dimension of the Algerian struggle: a narrative that celebrates the nation’s oral storytelling traditions long suppressed by the French. 

The success of Chronicle was a blessing and a curse. On one hand, it put Algerian cinema on the world map and gave Arab and African filmmakers belief. On the other, it overshadowed Lakhdar-Hamina’s subsequent work, which failed to replicate Chronicle’s success both critically and commercially despite the continuous backing of the Algerian government. 

Chronicle’s follow-up, Sandstorm (1982) – another desert epic about the struggle of a young mother who cannot have the boy her husband obsessively covets – was both a celebration of tribal life and a repudiation of the ruling patriarchy. It was Lakhdar-Hamina’s sole work not to engage with colonialism, a subject he returned to with his next film, The Last Image (1986). A sluggish coming of age drama set in 1940 that sees a quiet Algerian town disrupted by the arrival of a beautiful young French schoolteacher, The Last Image was notable for its focus on Jewish-Muslim relations but was hampered by excessive length, a distracting murder subplot, and overly familiar grand visuals that lacked the director’s signature lyricism. 

Lakhdar-Hamina would not direct another film until 2014 with the little-seen pre-independence war drama Twilight of Shadows, which barely screened outside Algeria. In the interim years, Algerian filmmakers would turn their attention to the civil war/Black Decade (1992-2002); women’s cinema would rise to the fore of the regional indie film scene; non-fiction would see a dramatic rise in popularity; and Elia Suleiman’s surreal, wry, anti-classical comedies would become the most influential Arab cinema of the new century. 

Lakhdar-Hamina’s patient, romantic pictures had no place in an Arab cinema constantly in flux; a cinema governed by increasing cynicism towards its political future. Some have deemed his cinema as nothing more than artifacts from a bygone era. Yet in his first five films, Lakhdar-Hamina produced some of most adventurous Arab and African films of their time, inspiring numerous filmmakers including Ousmane Sembène and Rachid Bouchareb. His influence was not solely artistic nor political; he aided several Algerian filmmakers during his stint as the head of the National Office of Commerce and Cinema in the 1970s and 1980s, while co-producing a number of major interntational productions, such as Chahine’s Return of the Prodigal Son (1978) and Ettore Scola’s Le Bal (1983). 

Lakhdar-Hamina, whose cinema was largely rooted in family stories, was a fighter, a poet, and a visionary. And in The Winds of the Aures, Hassan Terro, and Chronicle of the Years of Fires, he gave the world some of the most enduring Arab films ever made.