Political activist Kader Affak—the unforgettable surveyor of Tariq Teguia’s film Inland—runs a charity on the same premises as Le Sous-Marin literary café that he is renovating. In powerful chiaroscuro, he tells Yanis Kheloufi about the final days of his mother, a constitutive episode that gave birth to his unshakeable faith in the Algerian people.

• Documentary