If one film in the Oscar cosmos has relevance beyond entertainment, then that film would be Rachid Bouchareb's Outside the Law / Hors-la loi, a family saga about how three brothers cope with the aftermath of the Sétif massacre of 1945 -- an event that provided a turning point in Algeria's fight for liberation from French colonial rule.

Considered historically unorthodox, the film stirred controversy in France when released, not unlike its predecessor, Days of Glory, Bouchareb's telling of the Algerian soldiers who fought for France in WWII.

As a loose followup to Bouchareb's 2006 Oscar-nominated film, this new film, set between '45 and '62, stars Jamel Debbouze, Roschdy Zem and Sami Bouajila as the three Algerian siblings in France during Algeria's struggle for independence.

The 51-year-old Bouchareb has noted that one can't help but associate [the two films], because it's the same soldiers who fought for France against Germany. A lot of them were the same ones that went on to fight France. So historically speaking, the same group of people had a lot going on early in their lives. As he said, "When I was interviewing people for Days of Glory a lot of the people I was talking to were also telling me what happened after, which is how I came to write the other movie."

Bouchareb wrote the screenplay with these three actors who were in mind from the beginning. The tale told (plus possibly a third part in a planned trilogy) very much reflects the on-going struggle the North African world has had -- and is now having -- against authoritarian rule, whether by colonialists, homegrown dictators or religious fundamentalists.

Q: This is the Algerian entry for the Academy Awards; it made the final cut. What a big deal to have two films almost in a row. The last one was in 2007...

RB: We'll see what happens, but what's really important is that the film gets a wide audience throughout the world -- that it gets seen.

Q: Do you think of yourself as a uniquely Algerian, North African or French filmmaker?

RB: Actually, I consider myself a filmmaker first of all, and somebody who has his own history -- my own story. I was born in France, so I have my French history behind me, I have my Algerian history behind me, and the main thing for me is making films.

If you think about it, Hollywood was made by people who came from other places who had histories from all over the world, but [they are] still part of Hollywood. I really look at this as the land of cinema and I see myself in that tradition. Is The Godfather an Italian movie or an American movie? Sometimes [I think of it] as from the Mediterranean, sometimes it's not. America is very complex, but with The Godfather sometimes you think you're in an Italian family.

Q: When you have the platform of the Oscars and the opportunity for your film to be seen on the world stage -- not just in the context of the French or Algerian film world -- how do you take advantage of it?

RB: I almost look at the rest of the world as playing the role of a mediator for my films, because whenever there are negotiations, the negotiations take place through a mediator. For me, that's really the most interesting place to be.

I like to see my films travel and go elsewhere because ultimately, the world is a very, very, very small place. I like my films to have as many people as possible see them. It enables me then to learn whether these viewers in different cultures are seeing them in the same way, if I'm speaking about it in a way that touches them.

Q: North African actors started getting a lot more roles in French films maybe 10 years ago. It's improved a lot, but finding or getting the right people, I bet that's still hard. In the film you tapped some very well known actors, but 10 years ago they might not have been as easily available -- that's the challenge of finding the right people.

RB: Yes, it's true that we have a lot of good actors now. But it's still very difficult to show in films the kind of difficult situations that exist in the relationships between France and our origins in Africa and North Africa, but also between groups in contemporary France itself, and in dealing with the questions of exclusion and discrimination as they exist now in France.

As a result, it's often very difficult to be able to find the money to make these kinds of films. It's easy to use some actor like Jamel Debbouze -- he's very famous in comedies, he makes very big movies, but usually plays not difficult stories about his background, politics, or discrimination.

Sometimes you have an African American actor, like Eddie Murphy -- we like him so much in Beverly Hills Cop, or other movies. But do you think it's easy to get money in Hollywood when you make some movies about African American situations in suburban America? I don't know exactly the situation here, but they don't give you millions of dollars for many movies.

Q: The situations where a black, Latino or South Asian actor is playing a character that's not identifiable for ethnic reason but is just as a character are still rare. There's been a process of evolution, with each one having its own set of circumstances. It must be parallel for a Middle Eastern or North African actor and director in terms of either you can make a story that's about your background, or not about it at all, or something in between. But each one has its own problems in raising money and getting the balance right, for the appropriate story.

RB: We're at the very start. It's a calm and gentle process where we're just now starting to give actors roles where they're not specifically ethnic, and roles are being written that are not specifically identified as one particular ethnicity.

Q: Which is harder, to make a film that's about an Algerian within the context of a larger France, an Algerian within an Algerian context, or one that is just a person?

RB: Probably the most difficult thing is just to show an Algerian as a person. What's happening now, when you see characters who are Arab or Muslim in films and when you relate it to what's happening in the world today, you realize that the real strength in the audience mentality of how they are defining these people is based on these roots in the current events.

At some point it will be possible for a North African or Middle Easterner to play a heroic character, but right now it is rather difficult. It probably won't happen until there's more peace in the world, where this kind of character can be developed in a more serene kind of atmosphere.

Fifty years ago, somebody like Omar Sharif was able to play Russians and a whole range of characters. But at that time, people didn't really know a great deal about the Arab world, and so there was that opportunity to do so. But because of what Arabs and the Muslim world have come to represent, it's not possible to have somebody play that kind of heroic role the way they were able to do 50 years ago.

Q: Black actors not only play characters that have gone through this experience of the brothers in this film, but they've actually experienced it. Your actors actually had that experience, or their family has. It must inform their roles and inform you as a director and inform the making of the film, which is why Indigènes is so successful, and I think this film is so successful. There's that authenticity. It helps for you to get the actors into the character or the authenticity of the performance, or it allows you to know they understand more intimately.

RB: Do you mean does it help to make a film on an artistic level? Yes, because you get a very fast connection with this actor because the artist is further involved.

We have the same story, we have the same background -- we were born in France, our families come from Algeria, Morocco, and our grandfathers and family fought inside the French army to get independence for our family. Like my family -- my father is from the FLA in France and he worked and built and got money to support the revolution and everything. We need to say this part of history.

At this time, when I talked with the actors, we said, "But now we need to go to the cinema." We have a preoccupation to say our story, but we want to go beyond that stage of just making complaints and our pronouncements and to recall this on the screen.

Now what I really want to do is make cinema. I want to go get that cinematic element and go beyond the telling of stories in historical context, but to make them cinematic in a cinematic context.

Q: That's the exciting thing, to make that transition. What stories do you have to tell that are neutral in that way?

RB: I have one project about the French Connection from France. The start is in Indo-China, the French Connection is big in Indochina in 1920. My actors can play a person, not just French-Algerian. And I wrote the script with Larry Gross [writer of such films as Another 48 Hours]. It's a comedy, about a meeting between French Arabic and American, but it's very difficult at the beginning.

Q: These two movies are bookends to each other? Like a set?

RB: Actually, the birth of the film really took place when I was making Indigènes, because I had to do a lot of interviews with a lot of veterans from the Second World War. Many of these young men were between the ages of 20 and 25 and a lot of them were actually involved in the subsequent War for Independence in Algeria. So the idea was really born from those interviews that I did.

Q: It recalls American black soldiers who fought in World War II and what happened when they came back. I think we wouldn't have had such an active movement here to integrate if the black soldiers hadn't had that experience and then felt cheated when they came back. There is a parallel.

RB: Yes. Miracle at St. Anna, the Spike Lee film.

Q: That's a good example. It's a very interesting film. People criticized it, but what it conveyed was really valuable.

RB: I'm really interested in this subject. I'd like to know if there were a lot of films or books made about African American soldiers coming back from the Second World War and what their experiences were then.

Q: I think your film is in that tradition of showing the results or the dynamic that has not been seen. How much has it been seen in France? How fresh or new is this, especially having done Days of Glory or Indigènes?

RB: My film is pretty much the first one to discuss this subject.

Q: On the one hand, this is criminal activity, on the other side revolutionary, liberating activity. You're showing another point of view.

RB: Do you know Jean-Pierre Melville's work, like Army of Shadows?

Q: Not all of his films, but of course. yeah.

RB: I'm more in the tradition of [Ken Loach's] The Wind That Shakes the Barley -- if that is the title in English -- about [two brothers in] the Irish Republican Army. You've seenThe Battle of Algiers? If you look at that film, which was made in 1965, it's not really the same kind of film because basically you're looking at a group of Muslims who are fighting for their independence, but there is no link with world events that are occurring at the same place or any idea of what's developing outside at the same time.

What I tried to do in Indigènes is you must look at these soldiers. These were Arab-Muslim soldiers who actually fought against Fascism alongside what we call the Allies. With Indigènes it's evident, but with this film what I tried to do was to show a specific moment and what was happening at that time, and not to relate that film to events that are happening now in the present time. And that's why it's interesting that both of these films exist.

Q: By having this dynamic of the three brothers, three different ways people have approached it, you get this feeling of the family also. That makes for great material, but also a lot to manage-- how you managed it and figured out who to emphasize, who not to emphasize, how to emphasize, which brother at what point.

RB: The screenwriting process in this case is very difficult, because in effect what you're doing is focusing on a family and you're focusing on three separate brothers, each of whom has a separate destiny. But at the same time, what you have to try to do in the screenplay is to concentrate the attention of the viewers on the family as a whole and what's happening as a whole.

The essential idea of this film is really, despite the major events that are happening, how the destiny of a family can be affected by injustice. And in this case the one particular injustice, which takes place in the first scene of the film, is when their property is taken away from them and they're literally displaced and thrown out into the world.

This very action of being displaced from their property and their land changes their entire destiny. And in effect the real challenge of the film is to show how this family can try to stay united despite the fact that this has occurred. The model for me was John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath by director John Ford.

Q: I also thought there was a little bit of The Godfather.

RB: That's because there's also a revolutionary feeling about this novel. If you remember at the end, when Henry goes down he says he wants to go out and fight against injustice, and his mother is afraid in what form is that going to take. Except the difference between my film and John Ford's film is, I'm showing the actual methods that would be used to fight against this injustice.

Q: Without the gangster side of it, there was a Godfather element, because there was this battle between the gangster-like elements. Did you have a little bit of The Godfather in the back of your mind?

RB: Yes,The Godfather and Once Upon a Time in America. These area all the things that made me love cinema.

Q: You have brothers as well...

RB: Yes, eight brothers and sisters.

Q: What has your family thought about the movie?

RB: My mother is involved. My uncle, my aunt, my whole family were militant activists during the Algerian War. My mom told me stories, and she told me a lot of things that made their way into the film. The mother in the film is like my mother too, because she's afraid for what's going to happen to her children.

Q: Did worrying about how your family was going to look at this put a lot of responsibility on you, since it's closer to them in a way than some of your other films?

RB: My mom [has] seen a lot of film -- The Grapes of Wrath, The Godfather, Once Upon a Time in America -- and she's seen this story retold many, many times in cinema, and in effect, cinema is really like the link. It enables us to link all of these stories, so in a sense then it makes them universal. And even if we show something that we actually lived, the fact that we're showing it with actors, with music, it distances us from it.