Checks and Balances (2015)

CHECKS AND BALANCES  (2015)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Malik Bensmaïl
A fly-on-the-wall documentary about how news gets made, or at least how it gets made at El Watan, a feisty, French-language newspaper published in Algiers. There's almost no context here. Bensmaïl simply takes his camera into El Watan's editorial offices, and sometimes even the pressroom, and watches as reporters, editors, cartoonists and the guys who get ink on their hands labor over the latest edition. There's an election campaign going on - that's the big story - and the arguments and discussions you're eavesdropping on probably aren't much different from what you'd hear in any newsroom in the States. Two of the journalists especially go at it tooth and nail. One's a Marxist. The other most definitely is not. Both are extremely vocal, and neither will give an inch. What they have in common is a goal, call it an obsession, to put out the best newspaper on the planet, or at least in Algeria. That's what unites them, drives them, defines them: the adrenalin, the quest for truth (against a dodgy government), the race against time, and the knowledge that somewhere in a cavernous room where the roar of machinery is deafening and the air reeks with chemical fumes, they're rolling out the newsprint and inking up the press.