The Blond Boy From The Casbah
Filmmaker Antoine Lisner travels to his birthplace, Algiers, with his young son who is the same age he was when his family was forced to flee during the fight to free Algiers from France, to present his new film: an account of his childhood in mid-20th century Algeria during the country’s civil war. As he wanders through the city, the filmmaker immerses us in the moments of happiness, laughter, and tears of his childhood – spent between school, friends, and his Jewish family. Growing up in the final moments of Algeria’s pre-independence period, life was idyllic in what was often referred to as the Paris of the Mediterranean.
It’s a memory of times and places in North Africa and the Middle East when multiculturalism flourished—an epoch before fervid nationalists and religious extremists began to impose monocultures on the lands they ruled.