Raï is not dead

A raï compilation project, missing singers and a stubborn father: here is Hadj Sameer, DJ, and digger, gone for an investigation from Lyon to Alger through Paris, lost between the cabarets of Oran and the record shops of Marseille, forgotten in the middle of the synthesizers which crack and the volutes of chichas, launched on the tracks of the king Khaled and of the murdered prince Hasni... it was necessary at least such an adventure to tell the crazy epic of the raï.

And for good reason: which musical genre can claim to have passed, in the space of fifty years, from a hidden cabaret of Oran to the half-time of the super bowl in mondovision? Not much. However, it is indeed what tells the incredible history of this music born in Algeria at the end of the second world war, which conquered France then the whole world in the Nineties, before disappearing from the radars with the new millennium.