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Algerian director Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina, whose 1975 drama Chronicles of the Years of Fire stays Africa’s solely Cannes Palme d’Or to this present day, has died on the age of 91.
Lakhdar-Hamina’s household mentioned the producer and director died at his dwelling within the Algerian capital of Algers on May 23.
In quirk of destiny, the Cannes Film Festival screened Chronicles of the Years of Fire in its Cannes Classics program that day, in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the movie’s Palme d’Or, within the presence of the director’s son Malek Lakhdar-Hamina.
Set between the late Thirties and 1954, the film retells the Algerian War of Independence by the eyes of a peasant farmer, exploring the roots of the motion and depicting the harshness of French colonial rule.
In an period during which the movie world had but to begin embracing variety, Lakhdar-Hamina was one of many few African and Arab administrators to place in an everyday look in Cannes from the Nineteen Sixties to the Nineteen Eighties.
He competed for the Palme d’Or 4 instances, along with his different contenders together with The Winds of the Aures, which received the very best first movie prize in 1967 (now referred to as the Caméra d’Or), in addition to Sandstorm (1982) and Last Image (1986).
After a 30-year break, he returned to the director’s seat with Twilight of Shadows, which was Algeria’s submission to the Best Foreign Language Film class of the 88th Academy Awards in 2016.
Lakhdar-Hamina was born on February 26, 1934, in M’sila within the Aurès area in northeastern Algeria right into a farming household.
His filmography was formed by his experiences within the Algerian resistance through the War of Independence from 1954 to 1962, in addition to the loss of life of his father by the hands of the French military.
Lakhdar-Hamina joined the Algerian resistance in Tunis in 1958, the place he did an internship with Tunisian information, which led to him capturing his first quick movies. From there, he went on to check on the Prague movie and TV college FAMU.
Aside from his personal filmmaking, Lakhdar Hamina ran Algeria’s information service, the l’Office des Actualités Algériennes (OAA) from shortly after the revolution to 1974, and was additionally head of the Algerian National Office for Commerce and the Film Industry between 1981 and 1984.
The 4K restoration of Chronicles of the Years of Fire was undertaken by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna at L’Image Retrouvée (Paris) and L’Immagine Ritrovata (Bologna) laboratories.
It was funded by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation as a part of the African Film Heritage Project, an initiative created by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, the Pan African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI) and UNESCO – in collaboration with Cineteca di Bologna – to assist find, restore, and disseminate African cinema.
French distributor Les Acacias Distribution will theatrically re-release the movie in cinemas in France on August 6.