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The film The Battle of Algiers (1966) was the result of a meeting between Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo and Yacef Saâdi, one of the military leaders of the Front de Libération Nationale. Played mainly by non-professionals, and sometimes by the actual combatants, the film blurred the boundary between reality and fiction right from the start.
Its reception consolidates Algerian autofiction and international fiction: the Algerian government's desire to rewrite history intersects with the Western need to mythologize the struggle for independence. Thus, perceived as a documentary, the film legitimizes violence against the occupation, conceals the political illegitimacy of the 1965 coup d'état and rewrites history in a Manichean system that suits those who refuse to see a link between this period and the civil war of the 1990s.
At what point does fiction merge with history? And how can we distinguish between them when the very ontology of writing is denied, when reality is mythologized and writers imprisoned?
