Comedian, filmmaker and poet, Mohammed Zinet (محمد زينت) is best known for “Tahia Ya Didou” which has gradually become the cult film of two generations of film buffs. An unclassifiable comedy, full of life and fantasy, freshness and irony, the film was not to the taste of its sponsors from the municipality of Algiers who were expecting a tourist documentary on the capital. As a result, “Tahia Ya Didou” never saw a real release. The film will be restored and digitized in 2016. Born in 1932 in Algiers, Mohamed Zinet developed a passion for theater at a very young age, a period about which we know little other than that he led an amateur troupe called "El-Manar El-Djazairi" (The Algerian Torch) and that in 1947, in Paris, he presented an adaptation of Molière's "Bourgeois Gentilhomme" at the Salle Wagram. An ALN officer during the war of independence, he was injured then transported to Tunis where the FLN artistic troupe was created which constituted the core of the future Algerian National Theater. During his stay in Tunis, he played the role of Lakhdar in Kateb Yacine's "Encircled Corpse" by Jean-Marie Serreau. After a first internship in 1959 at the Berliner Ensemble in the GDR, Mohammed Zinet did a second at the Kammerspiele in Munich in 1961. The following year, he stayed in Paris where he was hired by Jean-Marie Serreau for the Scandinavian tour of Les Bonnes de Jean Genet and How to Get Rid of It by Eugène Ionesco. Returning to Algiers in 1964, he participated in the creation of the company Casbah Films and was an assistant on "Les Mains Libres" by Ennio Lorenzini (1964) and "The Battle of Algiers" by Gillo Pontecorvo (1966). He was also requested as an actor in “Monangambé” by Sarah Maldoror (1968) and “Les Trois Cousins” as well as “Les Ajoncs” by René Vautier (1970). Throughout his career, Mohammed Zinet will play among others in "Le Bougnoul" by Daniel Moosmann (1974), "Dupont Lajoie" by Yves Boisset (1974), "La Vie avant soi" by Moshe Mizrahi (1977), " Robert et Robert" by Claude Lelouch (1978), "Le Coup de Sirocco" by Alexandre Arcady (1979), "Les Sous-Doués" (1980) with its unforgettable and hilarious "our people will conquer" during the explosion of the couscous maker... He is finally the author of an unpublished play entitled "Tibelkachoutin" (which has been translated as "The Man with Twigs"). This was performed in Tunis. Died on April 10, 1995, after several years of hospitalization in Paris, Mohammed Zinet is buried in Algiers at the El-Kettar cemetery.
