Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina Dies: Algerian Cannes Palme d’Or Winner Was 91

Algerian director Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina, whose 1975 drama Chronicles of the Years of Fire remains Africa’s only Cannes Palme d’Or to this day, has died at the age of 91.

Lakhdar-Hamina’s family said the producer and director died at his home in the Algerian capital of Algers on May 23.

In quirk of fate, the Cannes Film Festival screened Chronicles of the Years of Fire in its Cannes Classics program that day, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the film’s Palme d’Or, in the presence of the director’s son Malek Lakhdar-Hamina.

Set between the late 1930s and 1954, the movie retells the Algerian War of Independence through the eyes of a peasant farmer, exploring the roots of the movement and depicting the harshness of French colonial rule.

In an era in which the film world had yet to start embracing diversity, Lakhdar-Hamina was one of the few African and Arab directors to put in a regular appearance in Cannes from the 1960s to the 1980s.

He competed for the Palme d’Or four times, with his other contenders including The Winds of the Aures, which won the best first film prize in 1967 (now known as the Caméra d’Or), as well as 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 category of the 88th Academy Awards in 2016.

Lakhdar-Hamina was born on February 26, 1934, in M’sila in the Aurès region in northeastern Algeria into a farming family.

His filmography was shaped by his experiences in the Algerian resistance during the War of Independence from 1954 to 1962, as well as the death of his father at the hands of the French army.

Lakhdar-Hamina joined the Algerian resistance in Tunis in 1958, where he did an internship with Tunisian news, which led to him shooting his first short films. From there, he went on to study at the Prague film and TV school FAMU.

Aside from his own filmmaking, Lakhdar Hamina ran Algeria’s news service, the l’Office des Actualités Algériennes (OAA) from shortly after the revolution to 1974, and was also 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 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 help locate, restore, and disseminate African cinema.

French distributor Les Acacias Distribution will theatrically re-release the film in cinemas in France on August 6.