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In 2007 the Algerian film director Okacha Touita made a film from the first volume of the powerfully noir-tinged crime series that made Yasmina Khadra popular throughout the world. The main character is the police commissioner Brahim Llob, a headstrong officer in his fifties who, from his office in the violent city of Algiers in the nineties, in the midst of civil war, gets wind of emerging Islamist groups close to him, inevitably becoming their target.
The plot of Morituri won the filmmaker over from the very first pages of the book: “I was immediately seduced by the quality of the writing and its atmosphere, which reveals a precise, acute reflection on contemporary Algerian society, dominated by disorder and chaos. […] Through Commissioner Llob and his caustic stare, Khadra takes us right into the heart of the conflict that devastated the country”.

Okacha Touita
Morituri is the fourth long length film by Okacha Touita (1943), Algerian film director, actor and screenwriter, whose work deals mainly with events in the most recent history of his homeland. The film Le cri des hommes (1990), centred on the repression exerted against the nationalists by the army and French police, had to wait nine years to be screened in France. For his first long length film, Les sacrifiés (1982), on the dramatic conflicts that also arose in France around the various groups fighting for Algeria’s independence, he obtained the Prix Georges Sadoul (1982) and the Mention spéciale du jury along with the Prix du public at the Journées cinématographiques d’Orléans (1982). His latest film, Opération Maillot, is from 2014.