Outside the Law

Outside the Law (Hors-la-loi, 2010) is a French-Algerian historical drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Rachid Bouchareb. Jamel Debbouze, Roschdy Zem, and Sami Bouajila play three brothers whose lives scatter across continents — a co-production spanning France, Algeria, Belgium, Italy, and Tunisia, running 137 minutes.

The family loses its Algerian land in the 1920s, and the three brothers end up on different trajectories. Messaoud enlists in the French army and ships out to fight in Indochina. Abdelkader surfaces in Paris as a committed organizer for Algerian independence. Saïd builds his stake in the boxing clubs and back-street venues of Pigalle, keeping politics at arm's length until it finds him anyway. The 1950s bring all three back into each other's orbit, with their mother at the center — the thread that keeps the family from coming apart completely while history pushes hard in the opposite direction.

Bouchareb made this as a companion piece to his earlier Days of Glory, following the same generation into a different kind of war: the quiet, brutal one fought in Paris apartment blocks and committee rooms for the right to exist as a nation. The film stirred real controversy at Cannes in 2010, which tells you something about the nerve it touches. Stream Outside the Law (2010) online on iFILM.