Generation Independence is a series of short documentaries about Algerian university students and graduates in the 1960s and 1970s. In a context of revolutionary enthusiasm, mass illiteracy and material shortages, these women and men got factories and transport up-and-running, designed university programmes, developed the national press and provided healthcare to isolated rural communities.

Generation Independence is not about post-colonial utopias, nor is it about post-colonial disillusionment. Instead, individual life stories explore how the belief that new things could be done every day, practical problems, meteoric social mobility and an authoritarian but not monolithic political system were all intertwined. It is about hope and compromise, audacity and adaptation, resistance and negotiation. It is about the messiness of everyday experience in a world of new opportunities, fresh obstacles and old ways of doing things.

Generation independence

A people’s history of Algeria in the 1960s and 1970s

GENERATION

INDEPENDENCE

Documentaries

Resources