Movies Similar to One hero, the people

Hustlers of Dubai

Dubai - the city of controversies. Six individuals go through personal insecurities, cultural pressures, money issues and the hustle of staying true to who they are. In the world that says otherwise. Is it all really worth it ? The film touches upon Arab identity, female role in the world, family values, Islam.

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How Much I Love You(1985)

Beginning with a promotional reel encouraging farming investments in Algeria and ending with the secret 1950s nuclear tests that France conducted using Algerian prisoners, How Much I Love You appropriates archival footage produced by the French colonial powers in Algeria. Meddour’s approach is disarmingly simple and yet awe-inspiring—his caustic undoing of colonial discourse is underscored by a liberating release of humor.

10.0

The Zerda or the Songs of Forgetting(1983)

“La Zerda and the songs of oblivion” (1982) is one of only two films made by the Algerian novelist Assia Djebar, with “La Nouba des femmes du mont Chenoua” (1977). Powerful poetic essay based on archives, in which Assia Djebar – in collaboration with the poet Malek Alloula and the composer Ahmed Essyad – deconstructs the French colonial propaganda of the Pathé-Gaumont newsreels from 1912 to 1942, to reveal the signs of revolt among the subjugated North African population. Through the reassembly of these propaganda images, Djebar recovers the history of the Zerda ceremonies, suggesting that the power and mysticism of this tradition were obliterated and erased by the predatory voyeurism of the colonial gaze. This very gaze is thus subverted and a hidden tradition of resistance and struggle is revealed, against any exoticizing and orientalist temptation.

7.6

Tahalra(1957)

Five young Italian climbers, Paolo Grunanger, Lorenzo Marimonti, Pietro Meciani, Lodovico Gaetani and Giorgio Gualco, members of the expedition organized under the patronage of the Milanese section of the Italian Alpine Club, reached Tamanrasset, in Hoggar, the Tuareg kingdom. From there, with a caravan of camels, they head towards the mountainous volcanic chain of Tahalra, little known to Westerners. During the exploration, climbers will climb seven virgin peaks via very difficult routes and at the same time carry out topographical surveys.

10.0

Expédition Hoggar 79(1979)

TSR documentary on the 1979 expedition to Algeria in the Atakor massif (Hoggar desert), organized by Geneva mountaineer Michel Vaucher and Jean-Blaise Fellay. The climbers make a dozen ascents including the famous summit of Adaouda (which means "finger" in Tamasheq, the Tuareg dialect), by several routes. Then a new route on the peaks of the southern Tezoulegs. They discover the volcanic geological characteristics of the Atakor massif and meet the nomadic inhabitants of the region, the Tuaregs, who are increasingly settling in the town of Tamanrasset.

10.0

Sahara Vertical(1986)

The climbing couple Heinz Mariacher and Luisa Iovane abandon their usual winter training spot to go in search of places more conducive to free climbing in Algeria in the Sahara desert, more precisely in the Hoggar massif, which saw pass the cream of world climbing Lionel Terray, Roger Frison-Roche, Lucien Bérardini, Michel Vaucher, Pierre Mazeaud, Guido Monzino, Patrick Edlinger, Patrick Berhault and many others. Their objective, to climb the east face of Garet El Djenoun, 500 m high, failed because the wall was too smooth and the cracks unstable. The journey continues in the Hoggar massif towards other peaks, where they find the climbing conditions they were hoping for. An overhang in the face of Tizouyag Nord will prove to be a major challenge for Heinz Mariacher.

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Hoggar 1973(1973)

In 1973, 6 guides from the National Ski and Mountaineering School (ENSA), including Charles Daubas and Walter Cecchinel, left by truck from Chamonix to Tamanrasset in the desert in Algeria with the aim of climbing some peaks of the Atakor massif including Adaouda and Tizouyag where they do the first of "La Voie de l'ENSA".

10.0

Pierre Clément, Cinéma et Révolution(2023)

Pierre Clément, student and photographer of René Vauthier, first accompanied him to Tunisia to make a film on the country's independence in 1957. Destiny led him to Algeria and his presence in February 1958 at the Tunisian-Algerian border changed his life. . Forever. He took his camera and photographed the attacks on Sakia Sidi Youssef before committing himself body and soul to the Algerian cause. Shortly after, he directed the film “Algerian Refugees” before being arrested, tortured and imprisoned, while his third film, “The National Liberation Army in Almaki”, was not finished. Abdel Nour Zahzah, a director who commemorates Pierre Clément, the director who risked his life, the brother of the Algerian resistance, who disappeared in 2007.

10.0

Guns of Freedom(1961)

This docu-fiction recounts the difficulties overcome by an ALN detachment whose perilous mission is to transport weapons and ammunition from Tunisia across the Algerian Sahara during the Algerian liberation war (1954-1962) against the French army of occupation.

10.0

Two Lives for Algeria and All the Wretched of the Earth(2025)

In 1994, at over seventy years old, Gilberte and William Sportisse, threatened by the FIS, arrived from Algeria. Of Jewish faith, he of Arabic mother tongue, they formed a fighting couple, started for the independence of Algeria, always with an unshakeable faith in humanity. They enjoy recounting the participation of Algerian Jews in the Second World War and the struggle for Algerian independence. They provide us with previously unpublished information on the public and clandestine struggles of the Algerian Communist Party before and after independence, and on the repression of activists who, like William and Gilberte Sportisse, were tortured and imprisoned after Colonel Boumédiène came to power. The film is an ode to understanding between people of different origins or cultures and a tribute to a couple whose youthful character and enthusiasm still astonish.

8.0

CHoosing at Twenty(2017)

Between 1954-1962, one hundred to three hundred young French people refused to participate in the Algerian war. These rebels, soldiers or conscripts were non-violent or anti-colonialists. Some took refuge in Switzerland where Swiss citizens came to their aid, while in France they were condemned as traitors to the country. In 1962, a few months after Independence, Villi Hermann went to a region devastated by war near the Algerian-Moroccan border, to help rebuild a school. In 2016 he returned to Algeria and reunited with his former students. He also met French refractories, now living in France or Switzerland.

6.8

The Three Teas in Algeria(2004)

Thierry Damilano and his team of Tuareg guides will take you on a trek in the Algerian Sahara, to discover the local culture with a mandatory visit to the hermitage of Father de Foucauld facing Assekrem, then climbing the legendary peaks of the Hoggar massif.

10.0

Kamel Messaoudi - His Life, His Work(2015)

On December 10, 1998, Kamel Messaoudi died in a traffic accident at the age of 37, at the height of his fame. In the early 1990s, when Algiers chaâbi was struggling to renew itself and attract young people, Kamel, born on January 30, 1961 in Algiers, into a modest family, achieved great success with his first album, notably featuring Echema’a (the candle) and other tracks where he did not hesitate to shake up the old repertoire, adding his own words, closer to the reality of an Algeria then bereaved by the violence of the dark decade of the 90s, and composing melodies supported by instruments such as the acoustic guitar or the piano.

10.0

Avant de franchir la ligne d'horizon(2010)

Habiba Djahnine went to meet activists who continue to take action. To meet them, to capture them in the spaces where they live, work or fight. They inscribe a few words of our tormented history. Memory, memory gaps, background noise, demonstrations... The film bears witness to 20 years of political mobilization/repression in Algeria.

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Anatomy of a First(1966)

In February 1966, Pierre Mazeaud and Lucien Berardini attempted a difficult first ascent to one of the summits of Garet El Djenoun, in the Hoggar massif, a mountain range located west of the Sahara, in the south of Algeria. The mountain has been preserved intact since Roger Frison-Roche's expedition in 1935. The documentary, superbly filmed by René Vernadet, won the Grand Prix at the Trento Film Festival in 1966.

10.0

Stones and Flies: Richard Long in the Sahara(1988)

In the fall of 1987, Philippe Haas accompanied the sculptor Richard Long to the Algerian Sahara and filmed him tracing with his feet, or constructing with desert stones, simple geometric figures (straight lines, circles, spirals). In counterpoint to the images, Richard Long explains his approach. Since 1967, Richard Long (1945, Bristol), who belongs to the land art movement, has traveled the world on foot and installed, in places often inaccessible to the public, stones, sticks and driftwood found in situ. His ephemeral works are reproduced through photography. He thus made walking an art, and land art an aspiration of modern man for solitude in nature.

10.0

Lost Mountain(2020)

On November 1, 1954, the National Liberation Front of Algeria announced the war for the country's independence. France, colonizer since 1830, hastened to reinforce its military contingent in the four corners of the country and to prevent the advance of the rebels. A little Chaoui, born in a mountainous region of the country, sees his placid childhood collapse in the middle of a crossfire that he does not understand. The story, inspired by real testimonies, is constructed with images from the archives of the French army. From this apparently dissociated dialogue between image and word arises a sensitive homage to the memory that rests in the archives and to the ignored voice of its protagonists.

10.0

Mariner of the Mountains(2023)

Filmmaker Karim Aïnouz decides to take a boat, cross the Mediterranean, and embark on his first journey to Algeria. Accompanied by the memory of his mother, Iracema, and his camera, Aïnouz gives a detailed account of the journey to his father’s homeland, interweaving present, past, and future.

6.5

Paroles d'un Prisonnier Français de l'ALN(2010)

The image of French prisoners was very often evoked in Algerian cinema and literature, but until today, no Algerian or even European report or documentary had given voice to one of these French prisoners of the war of Algeria. In the interest of truth and writing history, we set out in search of one of these French witnesses. This witness is René Rouby, prisoner of Amirouche's group for more than 114 days in 1958 in the Akfadou region in Kabylia. This is the first testimony from a French prisoner of the ALN (the National Liberation Army).

10.0

Sénac, Jean. Algérien, Poète(2011)

Jean Sénac, born in Béni Saf in Algeria in 1926 and died in Algiers in 1973, is today considered one of the great French writers and poets and the only one of his reputation to have accompanied the Algerian revolution before November 1954. part of all the debates and got involved, very early and with immense enthusiasm, in a work of commitment which ended badly. His poetry, his sexual preferences and his political lyricism work against him: rejected as much by the Pieds Noirs as by the FLN activists then by the power in place in Algiers, Jean Sénac was assassinated in 1973 at his home in Algiers, in circumstances never clarified.

10.0