1975: Palme d’or for Waqai Sinin Al-Djamr (Chronicle of the Years of Embers)

The 28th Festival de Cannes Competition was off to a prestigious, yet controversial start. The Jury, chaired by Jeanne Moreau, had to decide on a winner from the work of Scorsese, Herzog, Antonioni, and Costa-Gavras. Included among these renowned names, was a little-known director called Mohamed Lakhdar Hamina.

Eight years prior, the Algerian had made his Cannes debut with the remarkable Rih al awras (The Winds of the Aures), the story of a mother looking for her son who had been kidnapped by the French Army during the Algerian War. At the time, the film won the Prize for the First Work.

Mohamed Lakhdar Hamina’s fourth feature film, Waqai Sinin Al-Djamr (Chronicle of the Years of Embers) is presented as the first large-scale Algerian production. This almost three-hour-long saga chronicles the years preceding the uprising, from 1939 to 1954, in a country on the brink of turmoil. We follow Hamid, a young farmer forced to leave his village, which has been ravaged by typhus, and who is set to enlist in the French Army during World War II. He returns to a country consumed by misery and anger.

Mohamed Lakhdar Hamina explained it as follows:
“This is a film against injustice, against humiliation. What prevails is the motivation for the Algerian War. For young people who have not known this era, this would help them understand, while older people will recognize the truth in what is being told.”

However, the screening at Cannes was fraught with tension. Thirteen years after Algerian independence, the wounds had not yet healed. Former OAS secret army members, nostalgic for a French-ruled Algeria, were suspected of repeated bomb threats at the 1975 edition. Fortunately, they were idle threats, and this story had a happy ending for Mohamed Lakhdar Hamina, who became the first African filmmaker to receive the Palme d’or.