Acting
Dec 24, 1916
Maghnia, Algeria
Ahmed Ben Bella
Acting
Biography
Ahmed Ben Bella (Arabic: أحمد بن بلة), born officially on December 25, 1916 in Maghnia near Tlemcen in Oranie, in the northwest of Algeria (then French departments), and died on April 11, 2012 in Algiers, is a fighter for Algerian independence and an Algerian statesman. He was head of government from 1962 to 1963 and then the first president of the Republic from 1963 to 1965. Ben Bella is one of the nine "historical leaders" of the Revolutionary Committee of Unity and Action (CRUA), at the origin of the National Liberation Front (FLN), an Algerian independence party. He was arrested during the Algerian War but took part in the country's independence at the head of the FLN and became the first President of the Algerian Republic on September 15, 1963, a position he combined with that of Prime Minister. He held the latter position from September 27, 1962. He was overthrown by the coup d'état of June 19, 1965 led by his Deputy Prime Minister, Colonel Houari Boumédiène. He was forced into exile from 1980 to 1990 after having been imprisoned since the coup d'état.
Feature Films (3)
Where does submission to authority end? Where does individual responsibility begin? Each person confronted with violence asks themselves these questions. Through the testimonies of conscripts but also of Algerian activists, a memory of this war is constructed. The atrocities of the Algerian war are known. However, conscripts were pressured not to speak out upon their return. General de Bollardière was punished for opposing torture. Guy Mollet, President of the Council, denied any shameful practice before Parliament…
Pacification en Algérie
From the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, independent Algeria provided significant support to anti-colonial movements and revolutionaries worldwide. Successive presidents, Ahmed Ben Bella and then Houari Boumédiène, made Algiers a haven for activists fighting against colonial and racial oppression. Algiers the White became Algiers the Red. The internationalist Che Guevara established his base of operations there for his guerrilla activities in Africa. The African-American leader Eldridge Cleaver made it the international headquarters of the Black Panther Party. During this period, Algiers was known as "The Mecca of Revolutionaries."
Algiers, the Mecca of Revolutionaries (1962-1974)
In 1936, Gaston Revel entered the École Normale in Algiers, where he was supposed to learn how to "educate the native." It was also during this time that he began to take an interest in politics: he was drawn to the Popular Front, then to Spanish anarchism, and finally to communism. From 1940 to 1955, he taught in Algeria, first in rural areas, then in Bejaia. He returned to Europe because of the war and landed in Provence in September 1914, following the Allied advance. It was in Bejaia, in 1945, that he became fully committed to the Algerian Communist Party: in 1953, he ran for municipal office in the second electoral district (reserved for Algerians) and sat alongside the Muslims. In 1955, at the beginning of the war, he was forced to leave Algeria against his will. But, like thousands of other "red feet," he returned there in 1962 and resumed his teaching career. From all those years, he left a complete and deeply committed record, many letters, notebooks, and newspaper articles.
Gaston Revel, a schoolteacher in Algeria
Television & Series (3)
Empreintes is a French television program, broadcast on France 5 from 2007 to 2012, presented by Annick Cojean, consisting of a timeless library of 120 portraits of personalities from the world of music, literature, politics or sport, who have marked the era.
Empreintes
Explore the Kennedy family's rise to power and how personal relationships within the Kennedy dynasty shaped national and global events from the Cold War to the Wall Street crash.