Chronicle of the Year of Fire

The screening will be introduced by scholar and filmmaker Viola Shafik
 
A sweeping saga of the Algerian Revolution told in six chapters that spans the period from the Second World War to the War of Independence. The film focuses on a poor farmer, Ahmad, who leaves his barren, drought-stricken village only to be drafted into the French army; years later, he becomes passionately involved in the struggle to break his country free from the yoke of French colonialism. Often compared to The Battle of Algiers — whose cinematographer, Marcello Gatti, provides Chronicle's scorching CinemaScope compositions, including a legendary five-minute sequence that has to be seen to be believed — Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina's anti-colonialist epic profoundly fulfils the director's stated intention: “I tried to recount, with dignity and nobility, this uprising that then became the Algerian Revolution[..] an uprising not only against the colonizer but against a certain human condition.” (TIFF)

The film is regarded as a masterpiece of Arab cinema and remains the only Arab film to have won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. ALFILM presents it in its recently restored version by the World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna.

Viola Shafik is a German-Egyptian film theorist, curator, and filmmaker based in Berlin.