Free Men (Les Hommes libres)

French war drama Free Men (original title Les Hommes libres) dates from 2011. It tells of the part that Muslims of North African origin played in the Resistance and in sheltering Jews in Paris under the German occupation, a chapter of history rarely filmed. It was produced by Pyramide Productions. In Turkey it was released as Özgür Adamlar on 20 July 2012.

At its heart is Younes, a young Algerian immigrant who gets by on the black market. After an arrest he agrees to keep watch on the Grand Mosque of Paris, but his meeting with the Algerian Jewish singer Salim Halali, and the secret network run by the mosque’s rector Si Kaddour Benghabrit, which supplied Jews with false Muslim identity papers, slowly turn him into a resister. Younes is fictional; the other two were real. Tahar Rahim plays the young immigrant and Michael Lonsdale the rector, with Lubna Azabal, Mahmud Shalaby, Slimane Dazi and Karim Leklou among the cast.

Ismaël Ferroukhi directed and co-wrote the script with Alain-Michel Blanc. It is his second feature, arriving eight years after Le grand voyage, and its Moroccan and Parisian scenes rebuild the mood of the war years. A Turkish review rated it “average” but praised its universal, non-propagandist take on a Muslim viewpoint.