Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina, the first Arab and African director to win the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival, has died aged 91, his family said Friday.
The film-maker was awarded the prize in 1975 for Chronicle of the Years of Fire, a historical drama about the Algerian war of independence.
His children said he passed away at his home in Algiers.
Hamina – who was the oldest living recipient of the Palme d’Or – competed four times in the festival. His 1967 film The Winds of the Aurès won the best first work award.
The struggle for Algeria’s independence was at the heart of Chronicle of the Years of Fire, which in six chapters from 1939 to 1954 tells the story of a nation through its people, culminating in the uprising against French colonisation.
Born on 26 February 1934 in M’Sila in the mountainous Aurès region of north-east Algeria, Hamina was the son of modest peasants from the high plains. He attended agricultural school, then studied in the southern French town of Antibes, just along the Mediterranean coast from Cannes, where he met his future wife. The couple had four sons together.
During the Algerian war, his father was kidnapped, tortured and killed by the French army. He was called up to the French army in 1958 but deserted to join the Algerian resistance in Tunis.
He learned film-making through an internship working on Tunisian newsreels before venturing into short films.
