Happy Birthday to the National Front! For a long time, driven by the need to establish a dialogue around the Algerian War, René Vautier recorded the testimonies of Algerian independence activists, French conscripts and reservists, generals of the French army, historians... Thus, Mohamed Moulay, Ali Rouchaï, Mohamed Loulli, Germaine Tillion, Paul Teitgen, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Colonel Antoine Argoud, General de Bollardière, and General Jacques Massu, among others, gave their testimony before Vautier’s camera. A documentary long unseen that reminds us where the National Front comes from, which changed its name and gained some respectability after Jean-Marie Le Pen’s leadership. Warning: The film is a rescued copy. The technical quality is degraded, but that is only a detail... The Man with Bloody Hands (by René Vautier) I had embarked on a historical project: recording on video tapes the “memories” of witnesses of the Algerian War, so that one day young students from France and Algeria could write together, in images, a common history of the relations between the two peoples. I was told about a man, in Saint-Eugène, who, despite having been tortured, had trouble asserting his pension rights because he had never been a member of the FLN. I interviewed him somewhat by chance: he told me about his tortures, and how, between sessions of “gégène” (electric torture) and “bathtub” (immersion torture), his torturers had pushed his thumbs into his eye sockets: “as if they wanted to make my eyes pop out.” Then I did what I always did: showed him a series of photos of paratrooper officers, to ask if he recognized his torturers. Very dignifiedly, he told me he could no longer see... but he added: “I have a paper from Mr. Mayor (the mayor of Algiers at the time was Jacques Chevalier, former Minister of Defense under Mendès-France) where the name of the paratrooper lieutenant is written.” That’s how I saw that the name he couldn’t read — he had gone blind due to the tortures — was that of Lieutenant Le Pen. I had Jacques Chevalier’s signature authenticated by his family members and people who had worked with him; I checked documents from the time — there was no doubt. Apparently, there is a law in France forbidding the use of testimonies about atrocities committed during the Algerian War. Let’s not be ridiculous: Austrians are suspected of putting at the head of their republic a man accused of having “covered up” tortures, and yet we should hide from the French documents that the whole world will feast on during the presidential elections? Because no law can prevent the whole world — except France! — from knowing that we will have a candidate not only with delirious statements but with bloody hands. This article was published in L’Humanité on September 29, 1987.

"Here, the village chief, Sikali Wattara, was smoked out and shot in the back of the neck, a French bullet... Here, a seven-month-old child was killed, a French bullet blew her skull off... Here, blood on the wall, a pregnant woman came to die, two French bullets in her belly... On this African soil, four corpses, three men and a woman murdered in the name of us, people of France!" So spoke René Vautier on his first images as a filmmaker, shot clandestinely in 1949 across colonial Africa and saved in extremis from censorship. Banned for 40 years, the film was rehabilitated in 1990 by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which showed it in embassies in Africa to prove that French anti-colonial sentiment did indeed exist in the early 50s...  

Interview with historian Jacques Choukroun (bonus material from the DVD René Vautier in Algeria), focusing on the role of independent Algeria in Africa during the 1960s, as well as René Vautier's presence in post-independence Algeria — “the loudspeaker of peoples in struggle,” as the Breton filmmaker with the red camera was called. The discussion touches on: the Bandung Conference, the historic newspaper Révolution Africaine, pan-Africanism, Bouteflika’s role, and the 1965 coup d’état.

The history of Algeria from before 1830 to May 8, 1945. Going against all preconceived notions, the film reveals the reality of a country that, prior to colonization, had reached a level of development comparable to many European nations. It also exposes the hidden truths of colonial practices. The film ends with the May 8, 1945 massacre in Sétif, a prelude to the November 1954 uprising. With the participation of writer Kateb Yacine. In this documentary, made for Algerian Radio and Television in 1985, René Vautier revisits colonial history, tracing Algeria's past through engravings, drawings, and paintings from the pre-colonial era, accompanied by numerous interviews. The film includes extensive archival footage and an excerpt from René Vautier’s La Folle de Toujane, in which teacher Gilles Servat speaks with his students.

In 2012, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Algerian independence and the theatrical re-release of the restored version of the film "Avoir 20 ans dans les Aurès", René Vautier looks back on his career as a filmmaker involved in anti-colonial struggles.

The Law of Silence, a graduation documentary from La Fémis by Moïra Chappedelaine-Vautier, Nadia Zibat, and Raoul Seigneur, explores the 1963 Amnesty Law and its consequences on research conducted about the Algerian War. It features interviews conducted in 2002 with Henri Alleg, director of the Alger Républicain newspaper from 1951 to 1955, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, historian and essayist. The film also includes striking statements from General Massu and lawyers who dismantle the legal defenses of figures like Jean-Marie Le Pen. Moïra not only gives voice to her father, René Vautier, but also reuses footage he shot forty years earlier. A very compelling documentary that reminds us, among other things, that amnesty is not forgiveness, but the erasure of both the sentence and the crime itself.

Fair trading is very much in fashion today. The idea is to help the most underprivileged populations on our planet to emerge from this state thanks to a fairer distribution of revenue. Shea butter is increasingly appreciated in Europe, where it is used in the cosmetic industry and as a cocoa substitute. In sharing the lives of Shea butter producers in Burkina Faso, the film carries us to the heart of the problems of survival in Africa.

“Le cercle des noyés” (The circle of the drowned men) is the name given to a group of black political prisoners in Mauritania who were arrested in 1986 and incarcerated in the city of Oulata's former Colonial Fort. The documentary follows the subtle mental process of one of the ex-prisoners as he remembers his own story and that of his fellow prisoners. Like an echo, we see a series of images of the sites of their confinement – bare, stripped of all traces of this past.