In April, American indie darling A24 released Warfare, a drama based around the personal experiences of its co-director Ray Mendoza during the Western invasion of Iraq. The pro-military film follows a platoon of Navy SEALS as they attempt to fight their way out of certain death after being trapped by “insurgents” in an occupied household. The cast is composed of the most conventionally attractive group of male actors Hollywood can find, all of them seemingly and hilariously oblivious to the morally bankrupt propaganda piece they are taking part in. The film received wide applause among mainstream critics, many of whom praised the “highly objective” ode to the “real life heroes.”

To make things worse, Warfare disguises all context of the soldiers’ presence from its target Gen-Z audience. The film, which takes place during the 2006 Battle of Ramadi, provides no answers about why American soldiers are in Iraq. It is propelled by the glut of gunfire, as if the excitement of violence will deceive an audience too young to remember the horrors of this particular war. Divorced from its historical moment, Warfare is a Disneyland roller coaster onto which frothing war hawks can jump. Of course, this is nothing new for imperialist cinema. Western cultural production often seeks to establish itself as the sole current of humanity’s story, while manufacturing justifications for genocide and occupation.

If we are to contest this language of filmmaking, it is vital to not only criticize its form but to also appreciate its historical negations at the hands of anticolonial filmmakers. One of the first inceptions in building an oppositional cinema came from Egypt, wherein former president Gamel Abdel Nasser attempted to build a Pan-Arab vision of anticolonialism in 1952. The movies of this era, dubbed the Golden Age of Egyptian Cinema, allow us to understand the historic roots of anti-imperialist imagery and to connect the struggles of the past to the present.

Of the many projects produced during this time, few highlight the hypocrisy of imperialist cinema like Youssef Chahine’s Djamila, The Algerian (1958), a movie based on the capture of female National Liberation Front (FLN) fighter Djamila Bouhired, her subsequent torture by France, and the international outrage that followed her trial. The film contests the Islamophobic narratives of the imperial core and counters the racist depiction of Arab social history that reduces the role of women to figures in need of white saviorism while raising colonialism as some kind of feminist project. Pulling together the strands of Hollywood film language, Chahine parodies the false logic of the colonizing powers. As many of his films continue to be restored and screened around the world, Djamila, the Algerian remains largely unrecognized and unpreserved. It is often derided as overly mechanical or highly propagandized, but this reading fails to recognize Chahine’s skill in utilizing the cinematic history lorded over colonized nations by imperialism.

Movies arrived early in Egypt, coming only a week after the world’s first ever screening in Paris by the Lumiere Brothers in 1896. Despite a strong conglomeration of theaters and studios, most of the films shown in Cairo and beyond were glorified reshoots of Western stories. “Instead of inviting Egyptian authors to produce original scenarios or adapting Egyptian literature to the screen,” writes film scholar Ella Schochat in Critical Arts:

Films, plays or novels such as Waterloo Bridge, Camilla, Pygmalion, Le Miserables and others appeared on Egyptian screens, usually under new titles: Waterloo Bridge became Daima fi Qalbi (Always in My Heart), Pygmalion became Baia al Tufah (The Apple Vendor).

By reproducing the visual vernacular of the West, colonial forces set the stage for a popular culture constricted by European epistemologies. The myths of Western nations, their historical figures and languages, became the primary sources through which Egyptian intellectual life was required to traverse. Not only this, but most films fell into intense Orientalist caricatures of their audience, regularly depicting rape, sex mania, and murder as keystones of the Arab world. This period would be referred to by later Egyptian filmmakers and intellectuals as “Opium Cinema,” and heavily paralleled imperialist film epochs such as the fascist productions of Italy’s “telefoni bianchi” era or US “assembly line cinema.”

“There was nothing but that,” Chahine said of this period of American remakes in a 1996 interview with Cahiers du Cinéma. “Some went almost as far as to copy take for take in certain films. They became Arab-speaking American films. But that worked and brought a lot of money. I wanted to make my own films, not just American-inspired remakes.”

Chahine began his career around the rise of Nasser’s government in 1952, when filmmakers were able to operate outside of this Western cultural design. Recognizing the importance of art and culture in spreading his pan-Arab vision, Nasser created multiple fronts of dissemination, including the famous “Sawt-al-Arab” (Voice of the Arabs), as well as the Organization of Consolidation of Cinema. The government organization, while heavily censoring films that did not fall in Nasser’s political line of nation-building, was relatively progressive in its politics and countered the stranglehold of Western films that had flooded Cairo before the Free Officers Movement. The influx of domestic funding saw the number of productions soar, from 382 films produced from 1942 to 1952 to 513 films produced between 1952 and 1962. Of the many productions, a multitude were created to express pan-Arab solidarity with anticolonial revolutions such as those in Yemen and Algeria.

Djamila, The Algerian, released in 1958 and starring Egyptian star Magda al-Sabahi as the titular character, was born from these historical conditions. It was the first film to cover the armed struggle in Algeria and was quickly banned by France. Despite falling under its own fascist occupation a few years prior, France gleefully reestablished its colonial holdings in the post-World War II era and inflicted their own oppressive rule over the colonized. The Vichy government ordered the mass depopulation of rural areas, wherein almost two million Algerians were placed in concentration camps in an effort to pacify resistance. This was greatly at odds with the narrative of European enlightenment, which supposedly valued human rights and equality, As the anticolonial writer and political activist Walter Rodney wrote in his seminal book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, “When the French Revolution was made in the name of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,’ it did not extend to the black Africans who were enslaved by France in the West Indies and the Indian Ocean.”

Chahine shapes Djamila around this contradiction by using the language of European and American filmmaking to highlight the twisted logics of the occupying forces. His primary critique of French cultural hypocrisy lies in the representation of Djamila as Joan of Arc, both a historical figure of French nationalist mythos but also of European film history. Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) is widely viewed as a cinematic breakthrough for its use of the close-up shot. Prior to Dreyer’s Joan of Arc, cameras were usually placed in theatrical wide shots wherein viewers are positioned like audiences watching a stage play. While Dreyer was certainly not the first to use the close-up, he revolutionized the medium through shooting almost the entirety of his silent historical drama from this intimate angle. This humanist approach—which emphasized the tragedy of Joan’s martyrdom—created a new language that directors could use to provoke emotional responses from their audiences.

In the midst of the Hundred Year War, Joan was executed for heresy for her role in the struggle against English forces, as well as representing opposition to 15th-century gender roles. The obvious parallels between Joan and the real-life Djamila were not lost on the international public, who invoked the comparison many times throughout the protest for Djamila’s release. Although it is simple (and possibly reductive) to draw these similarities, Chahine pulls not from historical likeness but from cinematic comparisons. He recreates Joan’s trial—one of the most well-known scenes from Dreyer’s silent film—in Djamila to highlight the hypocrisy of the colonial court that has imprisoned the Algerian militant. The set for the trial is stripped to bare white walls, just as in Joan of Arc. The roles of the pompous judges who shouted down at Joan are now filled by the colonial officers deriding Djamila, who has her head shaved to match Joan’s (despite pictures from the real trial showing her full head of hair). We move to close-ups constantly on the judges’ faces, distorted by the high contrast lighting and sneering expressions that exactly parallel those of Joan’s judicial harassment. Djamila acts as the analogue to Joan, a national figure who combats the occupation of a foreign entity.

By reimagining the trial, Chahine calls into question the veracity of colonial powers in announcing any kind of moral claim over the colonized. How can a country assert any kind of authority on ethics when it betrays every stated code? The trial acts as a mirror to the French occupation, which is unwilling to recognize the irony of its situation despite the persistent espousal of anti-authoritarianism. “Because they are ‘left’ and ‘antifascist’ at home, the French consider they are entitled to lead other peoples, to give lessons in democracy, even by dint of bombs,” Frantz Fanon wrote in a scathing short essay on colonial hypocrisy of French leftists, “It thus calls, on our part, for more vigilance and severity.” Chahine takes a similar approach in critique, displaying through intertextual evidence the cracks in the myth of so-called liberal democratic ideals.

In depicting acts of resistance and rejecting portrayals of Algerian people as helpless victims, Chahine is a forebear of anticolonial cinema. “For the European observer, the process of artistic creation in the underdeveloped world is of interest only insofar as it satisfies a nostalgia for primitivism,” wrote the Brazilian director Glauber Rocha in his famous essay “The Aesthetics of Hunger.” This primitivism manifests in the form of perpetual victimhood—another form of dehumanization from which the colonized are painted as a population unable to establish their own sovereignty. Chahine sought to depict the violence of the colonized as a vital piece of the decolonial narrative.

Of the many depictions of violence in the film, the shootout in the café is the clearest manifestation of the film’s break with colonial linguistics. Djamila’s FLN comrade, Youssef (Ahmed Mazar), has infiltrated the ranks of the French military. The film has shown over the course of the last hour of its run-time injustice upon injustice visited upon the Algerian cast, with many attempts to strike back ending in failure. However, as Youssef watches the French soldiers crowd the cafeteria, he takes aim and begins to fire on the crowd of military men.

Having worked at 20th Century Fox during his time studying in the US, Chahine was acutely aware of the tendencies and practices of American cinema that continue to this day. Violence, usually reserved for John Wayne massacring a faceless crowd of white men masquerading as Native Americans, is reversed in the scene as the French colonizers are mowed down in a cathartic act of revolution. This is an inflection point of cinema, wherein the hegemonic use of technology is upturned and the language shot back across the globe. Just as the FLN forces steal French guns and uniforms from under the nose of their oppressors, Chahine has taken the visual vernacular of Western film and twisted it back on itself.

A self-described socialist, Chahine threw himself at odds with the strictly nationalist rhetoric popular across the region and always lent support to those on the periphery of society. Djamila was banned in Algeria for its celebration of women fighters in the socially conservative era of post-independence, but became a huge inspiration for Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers. Pontecorvo’s film even features a near remake of Djamila’s milk bar bombing scene.

With the widespread praise of movies like Warfare, it is clear that there still exists a dichotomy between the oppressed and oppressor, wherein the propaganda of liberation is denigrated and domination is celebrated as a necessary facet of life. As Fanon remarked, thoughtful vigilance and critique are vital in the interrogation of all the forms imperialist reproduction might take. In the case of Djamila, the film asks that we question the language of image-making and how content encourages audiences to regurgitate colonial ideology. How often will American media celebrate the murder of millions of Arab peoples, but still demand that the masses condemn Hamas for struggling against Zionist genocide? On the grounds of questions like these, imperialism asks humanity to internalize racist contradictions as natural fact.

The democratization of film through digital camera technology and the internet as a distribution center has meant that in looking for the current negations of films like Warfare, we should not confine ourselves to the cinema halls. Rather, the fighters of anti-colonialism have emerged as both combatants and directors of new forms of militant filmmaking. The most striking parallel to Djamila might be a propaganda montage of Houthi aircraft to the theme of Top Gun’s “Danger Zone.” Despite starving its people for over a decade, the American public was hardly aware of Yemen until the Houthis sank the first ship into the Red Sea in December 2023. But Yemeni people are not only aware of American imperialism, they live under its cultural logic.

By appreciating films such as Djamila, long cast away by the official canon of global cinema, we can understand the current media landscape of resistance fighters as not just another form of propaganda, but a declaration of humanity in the face of colonial hegemony.