Legendary Algerian film-maker Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina has passed away at the age of 91. He is most commonly remembered as the first (and only) African to win the coveted Palme d’Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival for his film Chronicles of the Years of Fire, a telling of the Algerian War of Independence through the eyes of a peasant.
As early as the 1960s he was one of the few African film-makers to claim a global platform. And, as Algerian cinema scholar Nabil Boudraa explains, he used that platform to stake a claim for rich storytelling with a powerful political message that helped build Algerian cinema.
