Opium and the Stick

Sep 14, 1970

2h 17m

★ 7.6

Overview

In 1950, in Algeria, in a village in Kabylia, Algerian resistance fighters resisted the French occupation army. Bachir returns to the village to escape the clashes ravaging Algiers. In Thala, he has two brothers, Ali and Belaïd. The first is engaged with the ALN (The National Liberation Army) and fights against the colonizer. His second brother, Belaïd, the eldest, is convinced of a French Algeria. His family torn apart, Bachir decides to join the war and takes sides against the repression of the French army. The French army is trying in vain to turn the population against the insurgents by using disinformation. The more time passes, the more the inhabitants of the village and surrounding areas, oppressed, rally to the cause of the FLN, their houses and their fields will be burned... Adaptation to the cinema of the eponymous novel Opium and the Stick, published in 1965, by Mouloud Mammeri, the film was dubbed into Tamazight (Berber), a first for Algerian cinema.

Genres

Action

Drama

War

Production Companies

Office National pour le Commerce et l'Industrie Cinématographique (ONCIC)

Opium and the Stick Trailers

No Trailers found.

Cast

Lazrak

Mustapha Kateb

Tayeb

Rouiched

Ali

Sid Ali Kouiret

Chaudier

Jean-Louis Trintignant

Farroudja

Marie-José Nat

Omar

Brahim Hadjadj

Abdelhalim Rais

Larbi Zekkal

Mahieddine Bachtarzi

Djelloul Bachdjarah

Kaci Ksentini

Ahmed Kadri (Krikèche)

Georges Lajoie is a Parisian café owner. As every summer, Georges, his wife Ginette and grown-up son Léon go on holiday to Loulou's campsite, where they meet up with the Schumacher family (whose father is a bailiff) and the Colin family (who sells bras in the markets). This year, their peace is slightly disturbed by the proximity of a construction site where foreign workers are employed. Xenophobic comments are made. One evening at the ball, a fight breaks out between Lajoie, Albert Schumacher and two algerian immigrant workers...

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