Rachid Bouchareb Unveils ‘Reggane,’ Algeria-Set Drama on France’s Nuclear Tests: ‘What Interests Me Is to Bring That to Light’ (EXCLUSIVE)

Oscar-nominated Franco-Algerian director Rachid Bouchareb (“Days of Glory”) is preparing his next feature, “Reggane,” a fiction film set against the backdrop of France’s first nuclear tests in the Algerian Sahara, a long-suppressed chapter of colonial history the filmmaker has been exploring for years.

Revealed exclusively to Variety at the Red Sea Film Festival, where Bouchareb is being honored for his body of work, “Reggane” expands on the research behind his short documentary “Boomerang Atomic,” which traced France’s nuclear program through archival material. For Bouchareb, the documentary, which premiered out of competition in Venice this year, was part of the groundwork for a larger fiction project.

“As I looked at the archive at the Ministry of Defense, at the INA (National Audiovisual Institute), and with private individuals, it allowed me to do this work of reading the archives, the images, in order to write my feature film,” he recalled.

Set in 1960, the year France carried out its first nuclear test near the desert town of Reggane, the film follows a young Algerian shepherd forcibly absorbed into life on a military base after his livestock is confiscated by the French army. Through his eyes, the film moves inside a closed world where Algerian workers and nomadic Tuareg populations live side-by-side with French soldiers and scientists.

“One thing struck me immediately,” Bouchareb observed. “In the images, the Algerians don’t exist. Yet there were thousands of them working on the base. Just like in ‘Days of Glory,’ the cameras chose not to film them.” Fiction, he emphasized, allows him “to fill that gap.”

That impulse to illuminate what he calls “areas where there is no light” has defined Bouchareb’s career, from “Days of Glory,” which helped prompt the French government to restore pensions to colonial soldiers, to “Outside the Law,” which unfolds during the Algerian war for independence, and “London River,” an intimate portrait of human connection that unfolds after the 2005 London bombings. With “Reggane,” he turns to a subject with ongoing consequences, embodied by radioactive contamination that, according to independent studies cited by the filmmaker, could persist for millennia.

Now in pre-production, the project is slated to begin filming in southern Algeria in September 2026. While access to the original nuclear test site remains restricted, the production will reconstruct part of the base as a primary set, supplemented by visual effects where necessary. Shooting will take place between Timimoun and Tamanrasset, deep in the Sahara.

Bouchareb plans to shoot the film in 65mm “because the Sahara is beautiful, and it deserves an image and technical means that can support the artistic side of the film and give it the scale it needs.”

Logistically, the film presents significant challenges, including long-distance travel and the difficulty of transporting heavy equipment to remote regions, but the director stressed that the project has full backing from Algerian authorities, including the Ministry of Culture. “The support is total,” he remarked, noting that the subject itself sits at the center of ongoing diplomatic and political discussions between France and Algeria.

The film will star Sami Bouajila, a longtime collaborator who previously appeared in “Days of Glory” and “Outside the Law,” alongside Algerian actors cast locally.

Financing is anchored by Algeria, Belgium (Umedia) and Italy (Urania Pictures), with a potential U.S. partner currently in discussion. Bouchareb will head production through his Paris-based outfit 3B Productions. The director confirmed that the project is proceeding outside France’s CNC system, citing language requirements and a desire to maintain flexibility on that front.

With “Reggane,” Bouchareb returns to themes that have long shaped his work, those of history, memory, and their political and social consequences. “Colonization was built on lies,” he reflected. “What interests me is to bring that to light, even for myself, to discover so many things that were never told, never written, by those who lived them.”