Now that the event has finished, I thought I would relate my Secret Cinema experience.
The film was
The Battle of Algiers. I knew vaguely of it, but had never seen it before and had no idea before the evening, despite trying to guess based on the clues Secret Cinema had given in their emails.
The dress code allows you to choose, effectively whether you are representing the French/European colonialists or the Algerians. Four of us arrived together going for the dress code that (unknown to us before we arrived) placed us as French. The queue in the tunnels was mocked up convincingly as a
checkpoint between the European Quarter and the Casbah in Algiers. There were street stalls and French soldiers doing random checks of participants. They would occasionally march off queuing "Algerian" participants, hands on head and
line them up against the wall, searching their belongings for bombs. All the time under barracking tannoy giving incomprehensible instructions to all in French. When an officer saw our "French" documents and dress, we were escorted to the front of the queue and let in to the main area of the tunnels.
I'd never been in the tunnels before, but they are quite maze-like and had been convincingly done up to represent the
Casbah complete with houses, Mosque and street stalls. As we wandered further in we came across the European quarter complete with bars,
cafes, dance halls and an
Air France ticket shop. We also stumbled on a
prison area where the French were torturing captive Algerians. As well as plenty of bemused and slightly distressed audience participants, there were plenty of actors playing police, army, Algerians and Europeans. All the talk was in either French or Arabic.
During the first part of the evening, we ended up being propositioned discretely to spy and inform on the FLN (Algerian independence movement) and/or work with the FLN. We started working for the FLN and ended up attending a
secret wedding (outlawed by the French) mimicking a scene from the film. This was then
raided by the French and the groom and Qazi marched off to the prison while the bride escaped into another part of the Casbah.
A couple of hours in, a larger gathering of military started performing manoeuvres in the central square. This effectively
divided the audience into two groups. Because we had been working with the FLN, we ended up in the Algerian group. At this point a bomb, planted by the FLN went off plunging us all into darkness. As the smoke cleared and light began to return, the FLN were urging us to escape via various back streets, through a house into a secret passage where we emerged into an
impromptu cinema. As far as we could tell, the other half of the audience had been shepherded through the European quarter into the plusher
French cinema.
We were then given a brief introduction to the film in arabic by the Qazi who had managed to escape from the soldiers after the bomb went off. The film itself was incredibly powerful, of course enhanced by the experiences we had just been through. Well worth watching if you haven't seen it already. Without giving anything away, when we left the cinema area at the end, the
Casbah had been remodelled to reflect what had happened in the film. Plenty of the audience, us included, looked quite stunned by what we had been though.
Looking at details on the film afterwards, it is not perhaps surprising that it was somewhat controversial in France at the time, being released only 3 or 4 years after Algerian independence. It was banned in France until 1972, and only shown on French television for the first time in 2004. And the resonance with various struggles in the middle east today is impossible to ignore.
You can also see the
full set of photos from Secret Cinema and this
account of the evening.
Based on this experience, I'll be back for more next time they organise an event.
