The film was directed and produced by Youssef Chahine and written by Abd al-Rahman Sharqawi, Ali al-Zarqani, and Naguib Mahfouz.

[1] Despite this, Chahine's first explicitly political film managed to galvanize wide solidarity with the Algerian resistance from across the Arab World, starting in Egypt.

[2][3] DJamila is a young Algerian woman living with her brother Hadi and uncle Mustafa in the Casbah neighborhood of Algiers during the French occupation of Algeria.

[2] With the government's signing of the nonalignment pact of 1955, the Egyptian nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956, and the Algerian revolution, the context allowed Chahine to contribute to the cultivation of the indigenous Third Worldist, anti-colonial rhetoric displayed in the film.

Some believe this was due to Djamila Bouhired's marriage to French lawyer Jacques Vergès, but others believe this was a tactic on the part of the Algerian government to further silence both the heroic role of women in the revolution and the highlighting of rape and torture in their narratives.