If Ali is fire, Mathieu is dry ice.

This is a powerful movie. It's one of the more dramatic ones we've watched so far. This movie was one of the harder ones for me to watch, simply because of some of the more gruesome violence that was portrayed. I read this article in the New York magazine. First I'd like to point out that there is way more inspiration to this movie than I thought. First of all, I knew that Saadi Yacef had some affiliation with the FLN, but I didn't know it had this much of an effect on the movie.

Subsidized by the Algerian government, the movie began as a sketchy screenplay written in a French prison by Saadi Yacef, the rebel leader of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). Upon his release, Yacef approached three filmmakers: Luchino Visconti, Francesco Rosi, and Pontecorvo (demonstrating that, whatever else might be said about them, some revolutionaries have good taste in movie directors). Yacef not only became the film’s producer but also stars in it as El-hadi Jaffar, the military leader of the FLN.

So you see the movie wouldn't have even existed if it weren't for that. Second, this guy basically wrote the movie based on stuff he had planned. The bombings of the two cafes and the Air France ticket office. These are things that Yacef himself had helped to plan. This movie really helped to show me that this kind of warfare is real. Every time I hear on the news about another roadside bombing or a car bombing, I really do think about the fact that there are casualties. The way these things are presented in the media doesn't really leave much to think about. I think after a while you just become desensitized to the fact that there is a lot of shit going on in the world. But after seeing the scene's in the two cafes with those close up shots of the little kid eating his ice cream, I can't help but think about that little kid when I hear about a bombing on the news. It's just really hard for me to think that this stuff happens and there isn't really a whole lot anyone can do about it. The author of this article seems to have mentioned everything there is possible to mention about this movie. Except...no, he didn't. I'm interested in knowing a little more about the publics initial reaction to this movie. It is mentioned that the movie was used as a training video, which is interesting. That must be quite a compliment to the director to hear that his movie was so good that people are using it to learn how to do their jobs better.

What reveals Pontecorvo as an artist, and not simply a propagandist of genius, is the sorrow he tries to stifle but that comes flooding through anyway—the sense that all sides in this conflict have lost their souls, and that all men are carrion.