The film’s director, an exile in France since 1993, asks Henri Alleg to accompany him to Algeria. It has been the director’s country of adoption since 1939, for which he would have been willing to sacrifice his life in the fight against the French paratroopers in 1957. He wants to find his former comrades from the colonial period.
For everyone, Alleg is “The Question,” the first book to have denounced the torture inflicted upon people during the Algerian War, written by someone who’d been subjected to it. It was published in the middle of the war and very quickly banned.
Algerians think of him as the founder of the only anti-colonial newspaper, the mythical “Alger-Républicain.” But for the director, he and his companions are above all the proof that, when faced with the ethnic divisions brought about by French colonization and Algerian nationalism, another Algeria was possible.