Kosmorama 2011: Outside The Law
The story of how a film grows bigger than itself and leaves an impact.
It was undenialably a bit strange walking to the screening of Outside The Law an early morning in Cannes last year.
The streets had been cleared and there were armed soldiers (not police officers) controlling every street corner. French authorities were so worried about riots because of the film, they had practically made Cannes look like a military camp on this particular day.
Rachid Bouchareb's Outside The Law has been nominated for an Oscar for best foreign language film. In April Kosmorama will be showing this film.
Fight for freedom
Algeria 1925. A poor, Arabic family is forced to leave the barren land they have lived off for generations. Priviliged French settlers drive them away with the law on their side.
Three brothers are essential to the story. With different personalities and skills they come to play different, yet important roles through the course of history. Abdelkader is the intellectual, the politically active. He ends up a political prisoner in a French prison. Messaoud is the efficient and tough one. He serves as a French soldier in Indochina. He parttakes in the defeat in Vietnam and learns about efficient freedom fighting. Said is the youngest who flees from the violence of Algeria and brings his mother to France. He creates his own existence in the underworld and refuses to take part in his brothers' idealism and fight for a free Algeria.
France
In the 1950's the family reunites in France. The fight for freedom and the growing political and military radicalism of the FLN now also becomes visible in France. The spiral of violence, the terror, the suppression and the internal dispute increases. The brothers are more or less willingly tangled up in the situation.
The film serves as an entertaining and efficient history lesson on how and why Algeria fought against the French oppression and finally won their freedom in 1962. The racist and oppressive politics of France against the people of Algeria is a disgrace of the history of Western European democracies. The film presents shocking proof of this. It is provocative how France as a cultural nation has dealt with this until way into the 1960's. Bouchareb also showed us this in his earlier film Days of Glory (Indigenes). The film draws attention to the appaling treatment of North African war veterans from the French colonies after World War II, and how they were denied war pensions up until the 1970's.
Conscience and shame
Having encountered the soldiers on the street corners in the morning, it was even more strange sitting in the theatre witnessing a story that, with just anger, disgraced the flag on the uniforms of the soldiers keeping guard on the outside.
Who were they protecting and against whom? Perhaps only a cultural nation with a conscience and a sense of shame and awareness of the depth of the matter is able to overreact to such an extent. To us Northerners it sure seemed strange. It seemed unlikely that ethnic North Africans and French Muslims should make riots and violent demonstrations about a film that so clearly speaks to their advantage.
Groundless
Perhaps was it the nationalist right wing they feared, that they would demonstrate against the film - even try to stop it? Some kind of reversed Green Berets action. Luckily this too was a groundless fear. Everything went about peacefully and we could walk back safely after the film. Soon the soldiers too had disappeared from the streets.
Before long we were focused on the next film and other problems, but the strength of the story of Outside The Law will always remain.
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