ADVERTISEMENTAlgerian director Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina, whose 1975 drama Chronique des Années de Braise (Chronicles of the Years of Fire) won Cannes’ Palme d’Or in 1975, has died aged 91.
He was the oldest living recipient of the Palme d’Or and Chronicles of the Years of Fire remains Africa’s only Palme d’Or to this day.
Lakhdar-Hamina’s family said the producer and director died at his home in the Algerian capital of Algers on 23 May. Coincidently, 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.
Set between 1939 and 1954, the movie retells the Algerian War of Independence through the eyes of a peasant farmer, depicting the harshness of French colonial rule.
Lakhdar-Hamina competed for the Palme d’Or four times, with The Winds of the Aures, which won the best first film prize in 1967, as well as Sandstorm (1982) and Last Image (1986).
After a 30-year break, Lakhdar-Hamina directed Twilight of Shadows, which was Algeria’s submission to the Best Foreign Language Film category of the 88th Academy Awards in 2016.
Born on 26 February 1934 in M’Sila in the Aurès region of north-east Algeria, Hamina studied in the southern French town of Antibes.
During the Algerian war, his father was tortured and killed by the French army. He was called up to the French army in 1958 but deserted to join the Algerian resistance in Tunis, where he did an internship with Tunisian news. He ran Algeria’s news service, the l’Office des Actualités Algériennes (OAA) from shortly after the revolution to 1974. He was also head of the Algerian National Office for Commerce and the Film Industry between 1981 and 1984.
French distributor Les Acacias Distribution will theatrically re-release Chronicles of the Years of Fire in cinemas in France on 6 August.
