Writing

Mouloud Mimoun

Mouloud Mimoun is a journalist, editor-in-chief, director. He was one of the columnists and then the editor-in-chief between 1977 and 1987 of Mosaïque, France 3's pioneering program on immigration issues. In 2009, he created the Le Maghreb des Films association. Mouloud Mimoun was born in France to an Algerian family that immigrated during the First World War. In 1954 his family returned to Algeria, Mouloud was 10 years old. From his childhood in Paris, his passion for the seventh art remained. Even before he was 10 years old, he frequented the now-defunct Artistic Voltaire room with his friends. The good student will then join the Normal School of Teachers in Algiers, where he notices how few Algerians are compared to the “Europeans”. Until then, he felt French: that is now impossible. Especially since, during the last year of the war, he saw his establishment burned by supporters of the OAS. An FLN official then asked him to help him as “organizing secretary”. A few months later, he joined the press agency created by the first Algerian government. Aged just over 18, he is the youngest journalist at APS (Algérie Presse Service) where, responsible for covering youth and sports, he often rubs shoulders with the very young minister responsible for this area, Abdelaziz Bouteflika. He continued to frequent cinemas and began to write about cinema, notably in the daily El Moudjahid and the weekly Algérie-Actualité, becoming a pioneer of film criticism in his country. In 1965, it was quite natural that he joined the Algerian News Office, headed by filmmaker Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina, of which he would become editor-in-chief. From now on, he will no longer leave the world of images, becoming one of the main animators of the Algiers cinema library, then at the height of its glory: it regularly receives the greatest filmmakers on the planet such as Jean-Luc Godard, Youssef Chahine , Glauber Rocha or Sembène Ousmane. “Paradoxically, a period of great freedom and excitement in terms of culture under Boumédiène, even though the single party reigned. »