Rialto Pictures re-releasing “THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS,” Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo’s legendary 1965 re-telling of the struggle for Algerian independence from France. One of the most influential films in the history of political cinema, “THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS” won the Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1965 and was nominated for three Academy Awards (Best Foreign Film, Best Director and Best Story and Screenplay) but has long been unavailable in the U.S. in any form. It opens in theaters in New York (Film Forum), Los Angeles (Laemmle Sunset 5, Landmark Westside Pavilion and Laemmle Showcase-Pasadena), Chicago (Music Box) and Washington D.C. (Landmark E-Street and Landmark Bethesda Row-Bethesda, MD) on January 9, 2004, followed by a national expansion. New 35mm prints will be struck for the re-release, with new subtitles rendering the French and Arabic dialogue accurately for the first time.
Shot in the streets of Algiers in documentary style, “THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS” vividly re-creates the tumultuous Algerian uprising against the occupying French in the late 1950s. As the violence escalates on both sides, the French torture prisoners for information and the Algerians resort to terrorism in their quest for independence.
