EXCLUSIVE: Rachid Bouchareb’s upcoming feature film Reggane, exploring France’s controversial nuclear tests in Algeria’s Sahara Desert in the early 1960s, has sparked interest out of the U.S. and Asia.
The Cohen Media Group and Singapore and Japan-based production company Kingyo Films are talks to board the feature, which Bouchareb plans to shoot next year.
The French Algerian director, known for ground-breaking French-language films such as Days of Glory and Outside the Law as well as English-language features London River and Just Like A Woman, is at the Red Sea Film Festival this year as one of is honorees.
Speaking to Deadline on the fringes of festival, Bouchareb said he was in advanced talks with Kingyo Films and has an agreement in principle with Cohen Media Group, which has previously gotten behind Outside the Law, Just Like A Woman and Two Men in Town, and also distributed The Insult, which the director’s company produced.
Kingyo has offices in Singapore and Japan. Its recent credits include Dear Viet, about a man who born conjoined to his twin brother Viet in 1981 as a result of the use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, which also chimes with the storyline of Reggane.
The upcoming feature takes its name from the Algerian town of Reggane, which is located just 30 miles from France’s nuclear test site.
At the time of the test, it was home to a 6,000-strong population, while the nuclear base employed 6,500 engineers, soldiers and another 3,500 local manual labourers.
The French government claimed the tests posed no danger to human life, but everyone in the area was exposed to radiation and cancers and birth defects rose in the local population in their wake.
“The big lie was that the Sahara is empty, that no-one lives there. I know this desert, and it has inhabitants, the Tuaregs, nomads, it’s a living place,” says Bouchareb, who shot his 1991 film Cheb in the Sahara.
The director wants to revisit the events surrounding the tests through the eyes of the Algerians on the ground, whose stories and faces never appeared in the French reports and news reels of the time.
Long-time collaborator Sami Bouajila will play a shepherd whose goats are requisitioned by the French army as he travels through the area on the way to the market to sell them, with dreams of becoming a fisherman with the proceeds.
He is also press-ganged into working at the base. When he learns that his animals will be used for research related to the nuclear blasts, he embarks on a plan to break them out.
“These shepherds were the first real cowboys,” says Bouchareb.
There will be a broad range of characters including the other Algerians working on the base; a female French scientist and a young French cameraman, whose job it is to shoot the test blasts.
As part of his research, Bouchareb combed through France’s audiovisual archives (INA) for material related to the tests.
He uncovered footage of the lives of the French engineers and soldiers on the base; interviews with politicians and top-ranking military personnel, images of the blasts, and Vox-pops with people on the streets of Paris in the wake of tests.
Fascinated by what he had found, he pieced it all together to create the short documentary Boomerang Atomic, which world premiered at Venice early this year.
“There’s not much very written material. A lot of stuff is classified. But I did find news images, from 1959, ‘60 and ‘62… not a lot, but enough to get a better sense of the period and the subject,” he says.
He set upon the idea of making the documentary as a way of explaining to potential partners what he was trying to do.
Bouchareb first came across the story of the tests while researching Days of Glory, about the mistreatment of Northern African men who enlisted in the French army, and Outside the Law, following the trajectories of three Algerian brothers in France against the backdrop of the war of independence.
As with those two films, the director’s impulse to explore the story of the nuclear tests was driven in part by the fact the presence of Algerians and their feeling about what was going on was completely undocumented at the time.
Bouchareb has secured the support of Algeria for the film, which will also provide logistical support around the military scenes.
“The army will help me with planes and helicopters from the 1960s,” said Bouchareb, who has previously worked with Algeria on Cheb, Outside the Law and Road to Istanbul.
Bouchareb plans to lead production through his Paris-based outfit 3B Productions. Other partners include Belgian company Umedia and Italy’s Urania Pictures.
The film comes amid difficult relations between Algeria and France, sparked partly by the latter’s decision to recognize Morocco’s sovereignty over disputed territory in the Western Sahara.
The tension deepened in early December after an Algerian court upheld a seven-year jail sentence for French sports journalist Christophe Gleizes on charges of “glorifying terrorism” in relation to an interview he did with a soccer official accused of ties to a separatist movement.
Bouchareb said he was not looking to France’s National Cinema Centre for support, not because of the tension but rather because he wanted to shoot the film in Arabic, while the body requires films to be 51% in French to qualify.
Saudi Arabia might also seem like an obvious port of call for finance given his recent honor at the Red Sea Film Festival.
Bouchareb said he was open to the idea of working with the country but that he was determined to make the film in the Algerian Sahara.
“I want to shoot the story, which takes place in Algeria, in Algeria, unless I need a hi-tech studio for the special effects… maybe there is something there,” he said.
The director is aiming to start building a reconstruction of the nuclear test base in the desert between Timimoun and Tamanrasset in March 2026.
Taking about his trip to Jeddah, Bouchareb said he was impressed by the Saudi Arabia’s attempt to build a film culture and industry.
“They’re trying to build and educate a generation of young people who want to pursue this career, and they have some pretty significant resources,” said Bouchareb.
He noted the raft of stars passing through the festival and participating in conversation events, often attended by a young crowd of aspiring film professionals.
“When I was starting out, I didn’t have this sort of exposure to filmmakers and actors… I wasn’t being introduced to Queen Latifah, Kirsten Dunst, Juliette Binoche, and so on… they’re moving very fast.”
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