PARIS - The French colonial experience in Algeria is a wound that never quite seems to close. Anger and guilt about Algeria infuse some of the anxiety today about the heavily immigrant and Muslim banlieues, or suburbs, about the French concern with national identity, radical Islam and veiled women.

Lately, France has been moved and angered by two films about Algeria and the French confrontation with its colonial past. One, made by Rachid Bouchareb, a Frenchman of Algerian descent, is a raging historical fiction about Algeria’s fight for independence; the other, by Xavier Beauvois, is suffused with religious belief and saintliness.

One film features Algerian martyrs and the other French martyrs. Both are remarkably unbalanced, and both use the “other” as puppets in a historical drama. One glorifies criminality and terrorism in the name of Algerian freedom and justice, while the other, set in the mid- 1990s, looks on horrified as religion mixed with Algerian politics seeks to justify murder and terrorism.

Yet both films have been chosen by their respective countries to represent them for the foreign-language Academy Award, which will be presented on February 27.

“It is a wound,” said Benjamin Stora, one of France’s best historians of Algeria and French colonialism. “Algeria continues to obsess people and still torments French society.”

Mr. Beauvois’s movie, “Des Hommes et Des Dieux” (“Of Gods and Men”) is a quiet, contemplative drama about faith. It features some of France’s best actors, including Michael Lonsdale and Lambert Wilson, in a largely true story of nine Trappist monks who live in the monastery of Tibhirine. In March 1996, seven were kidnapped during the Algerian civil war, held for two months and found dead, beheaded, in May.

The Armed Islamic Group (G.I.A.) claimed responsibility.

The film touched something profound in France.

The newspaper Le Monde said, “The monks of Tibhirine incarnate everything that the public, from the left to the right, no longer finds in society - nobility of spirit, a sense of sacrifice, freedom, sincerity, daily ecology, meditation, reflection on death.” Le Figaro said that the film touched on contemporary unease: “The Islamist surge and the situation of Christians in the Muslim world in general.”

Despite the murders, the film is idyllic and bizarrely apolitical. It seems strangely ignorant of the colonial implantation that the monastery represents. It is an odd obliviousness in a country where jihad is on the rise.

By contrast, “Hors-la-Loi” (“Outside the Law”) is an action film. When it was first shown, at the Cannes Film Festival, riot police officers were stationed nearby to deal with angry French demonstrators.

Le Parisien called it “the film that disturbs” because it is an angry and coarse indictment of French colonial rule, opening with the May 1945 massacre of mostly unarmed Algerian civilians by French soldiers.

Algeria finally won its independence in 1962 after a war that shook France and caused nearly a million French citizens of Algeria and at least 100,000 Algerian supporters of French rule to emigrate to France.

The film features three fine Frenchborn actors of North African descent (none Algerian) playing three brothers who survive the massacre - depicted as an act of complete barbarity. The brothers immigrate to France, where they become committed to the Algerian revolution.

The story is little known, and compelling. But it is Mr. Bouchareb’s effort to compare the National Liberation Front, viewed by the French as terrorists, to the French Resistance against the Nazis that is most controversial, and what irks most French critics.

Mr. Bouchareb dismisses the protests as ignorant, saying the film is about “injustice.”

But Mr. Stora, the historian, says that in both films, “Algeria is absent.”

Algeria is not France’s Vietnam, he said, but something more ingrained. “It is much more complicated,” he said. “France is now getting slightly more involved in this part of its history,” with more documentaries on television. “But the French can’t, for now, see their tragedy on the big screen.”


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