A journey through Algerian music, past and present, alongside a political look at Algerian society today. This documentary shows how music and musicians representing Afro-Maghrebian new tendancies, contributes to the blending and the fusion of Maghrebian and African cultures, as well as of the European and Western one. It tells about exile, about artist's feelings, about today Algeria. It shows how Maghrebian living in France express their musical culture, their roots, their traditions, mixing them up with the other cultures they meets.

Illustrated with archival photographs, animations and live action, this film explores the history and historical and spiritual heritage of Emir Abd El-Kader. Algerian leader of the 19th century, was admired by Abraham Lincoln and celebrated to this day by the Red Cross as a great humanitarian. Emir Abd el-Kader, the man who challenged the French armies from 1832 to 1847 before creating the bases of a real Algerian state, is today considered by independent Algeria as one of the most outstanding figures. of its history. The nobility of his attitude after his capture and the very effective protection he brought to the Christians of Damascus at the end of his life also earned him great prestige among his former adversaries. A documentary told in dialectal Arabic by the voice of Amazigh Kateb.

El Madani set out on an odyssey to discover the roots of the Gnawa music. Through concerts in Algeria, Morocco and France and interviews with Gnawa Diffusion’s Amzigh Kateb and Aziz Maysour, El Madani delves deep into the heart of traditional Moroccan and Algerian culture in a fascinating journey of custom and rituals across the Maghreb and Mali.

At the turn of 1990 in Algeria, in an end-of-era atmosphere marked by the victory of the Islamists in the municipal elections, then in the interrupted legislative elections of 1991, a prelude to a decade of particularly barbaric violence, the Algerians will experience the radical Islamism, its desire to rule public and private life and a daily life of attacks, assassinations, then collective massacres, which left 200,000 dead. Literature and cinema have strived to question and bear witness to the enormous trauma of this period called the “black decade”.