The Battle of Algiers

Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1966 and went on to three Academy Award nominations, including Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, yet it had no Italian distributor for almost two years because the French government was lobbying European distributors to suppress it. France did not screen it until 1971. In 2003 it was reportedly shown to American military officers preparing for operations in Iraq, with the Pentagon's invitation reading: How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas.

Its subject is the FLN's three-year urban guerrilla campaign against French colonial rule in Algiers (1954-1957), dramatised with the docudrama immediacy Pontecorvo and his cinematographer Marcello Gatti developed for the project. Non-professional actors, location shooting and a deliberately newsreel-style monochrome have fooled audiences into taking certain scenes for archive footage, which an opening title card directly disclaims. Yacef Saâdi, a real former FLN commander, plays the FLN leader Saari Kader; Brahim Hadjadj plays Ali La Pointe, the petty criminal turned militant.

Ennio Morricone's score, built on a percussive military signal and a sustained female vocal line, is among his most distinctive. The film gives an honest account of how to organise an anti-colonial uprising and an equally honest account of what that costs morally, which is why insurgents and counter-insurgents alike have called it required viewing.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: We think it is the most morally serious political film Europe has produced, and a primer in how cinema can bear witness without taking the easy side. It has been banned again and again, and screened again and again.