The story follows the Lorenzos and the Ojedas, the two land-owning clans in the island province of Negros, who were trying to cope and survive the war that lasted three tumultuous years, where they experienced or witnessed violence, blood, horror, and death. It is structured into three parts: Oro, a life of luxury and comfort in the city; Plata, a still-luxurious time of refuge in a provincial hacienda; and finally, Mata, a toilsome retreat deeper into the mountains. A war not only turned them into miserable people but also turned them into animals.
In 1950, in Algeria, in a village in Kabylia, Algerian resistance fighters resisted the French occupation army. Bachir returns to the village to escape the clashes ravaging Algiers. In Thala, he has two brothers, Ali and Belaïd. The first is engaged with the ALN (The National Liberation Army) and fights against the colonizer. His second brother, Belaïd, the eldest, is convinced of a French Algeria. His family torn apart, Bachir decides to join the war and takes sides against the repression of the French army. The French army is trying in vain to turn the population against the insurgents by using disinformation. The more time passes, the more the inhabitants of the village and surrounding areas, oppressed, rally to the cause of the FLN, their houses and their fields will be burned... Adaptation to the cinema of the eponymous novel Opium and the Stick, published in 1965, by Mouloud Mammeri, the film was dubbed into Tamazight (Berber), a first for Algerian cinema.
Djamila, a young Algerian woman living with her brother Hadi and her uncle Mustafa in the Casbah district of Algiers under the French occupation of Algeria, sees the full extent of injustice, tyranny and cruelty on his compatriots by French soldiers. Jamila's nationalist spirit will be strengthened when French forces invade her university to arrest her classmate Amina who commits suicide by ingesting poison. Shortly after the prominent Algerian guerrilla leader Youssef takes refuge with her, she realizes that her uncle Mustafa is part of this network of anti-colonial rebel fighters. Her uncle linked her to the National Liberation Front (FLN). A series of events illustrate Jamila's participation in resistance operations against the occupier before she was finally captured and tortured. Finally, despite the efforts of her French lawyer, Jamila is sentenced to death...
The transformations of the daily life of the Algerian people during the destructive French occupation, then during the war of liberation. While military repression is in full swing, a peasant woman finds herself alone in her mountain home when her only son is kidnapped by French soldiers shortly after her husband's death during a raid. One day, seeing a dead chicken, which she considers a bad omen, she decides to leave home and embarks on a painful journey through the mountains. Accompanied by a couple of chickens, she moves from one detention camp to another in a desperate search for her missing son. The film is inspired by the events experienced by the director's family.