One of France’s most celebrated screenwriters is taking on its biggest taboo, the bloody conflict in Algeria, in a new war film.Abdel Raouf Dafri told AFP that he had been itching for years to broach the delicate subject.

The writer of the Oscar-nominated “A Prophet”, and the Emmy-winning television series “Braquo”, has Algerian roots but was born in the French port of Marseille, where many former French “pied noir” colonists who were forced to flee Algeria settled. The film’s title “May an impure blood…” (Qu’un sang impur…) is plucked from the most controversial line in the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise”, which ends “…water our fields”. Dafri cleverly turns it around to refer to “the blood of the colonised” who suffered under the French, which “just goes to show how universal our national anthem is”, he argued.  [ . . . ]

Read more at: ‘A Prophet’ creator takes on France’s war in Algeria – The Local