Restoring a film is, first and foremost, saving it.
It was with this sentence that Nabil Djedouani captivated the attention of the many students who attended his masterclass, organized on December 5, 2025, at the small theater of the Riadh El Feth Office, as part of the Algiers International Film Festival. The filmmaker and researcher, founder of the Digital Archives of Algerian Cinema, recounted the fascinating story of Tahar Hannache and his film “Les Plongeurs du désert” (« The Desert Divers ») (1952), a film believed to be lost but now reborn thanks to meticulous and tireless work.
« Cinema is fragile film stock that degrades. Without restoration, everything disappears, » he explained. In the case of Algerian films, the mission often resembles a « race against time. » The heritage has been dispersed, damaged, censored, or simply forgotten. « The fate of the film The Desert Divers narrowly escaped oblivion. The work had almost disappeared. Only a single trace remained, consisting of two old 16mm copies, carefully preserved by the director’s daughter. Reels marked by time, sometimes spliced, but of inestimable value. Without them, the film would have been lost forever, » confided Djedouani.
The investigative work then began with the reels, which were digitized image by image. No negative, no complete version. The recovered copy was only 21 minutes long. « We can guess there are cuts, missing parts. That’s part of the film’s history, » the restorer slipped in.
Subsequently, the invisible stage arrived—the one that transforms the fragile into the living: stabilizing the image, repairing burns, and mitigating scratches. « We are not trying to beautify. We are trying to bring it back to life, » specified Djedouani. This rebirth also concerns the film itself, a truly almost political act.
For the researcher, restoring a film is goldsmith’s work and a battle against time. « The recovered reels showed scratches, cuts, and crude splices; some images were literally held together by a simple piece of Scotch tape. The credits were in a catastrophic state. Film stock is a living organism that degrades physically and chemically, sometimes due to ‘vinegar syndrome.’ Humidity, heat, and time have left irreversible traces, like fungi erasing words and faces, » he explained.
Then came the more severe wounds, with tears running through every image and holes left by projector burns. « Without a clean image before or after, the software cannot repair it, » detailed the restorer. He believes it is then necessary to slightly crop the frame to save the essential.
After these repairs, the meticulous cleaning of every centimeter of film stock by hand began, followed by image-by-image digitization with a specialized scanner. Each strip was thus carefully captured, ready to be processed by the restoration software. Persistent scratches were sometimes kept so as not to alter the authenticity of the images. Ethics take precedence, as the goal is not to colorize or smooth the grain, but to restore the film as it was shot. « Every shot is processed individually, image by image, then checked with the naked eye and corrected with the graphic palette—24 images per second. »
The screening in a ciné-concert format made it possible to recompose the score by separating the sound tracks.
Furthermore, Djedouani highlighted the importance of documentary research. Set photos, old articles, original desert landscapes—every element tells a part of Tahar Hannache’s story and inspiration.
Finally, Djedouani warned against the use of images generated by artificial intelligence. « Nothing will ever replace real research, meetings with families, and access to original archives. AI can create seductive images, but they do not tell the true history of Algerian cinema. »
