This short film, taken from the feature La Folle de Toujane, brings to the foreground a political event almost separate from its main storyline. René Vautier plays a “committed” director-producer who has just witnessed the brutal beating of an “Arab” by the police in the street, right in front of the café where he's having lunch. The scene deeply shocks him; he doesn't react in the moment, but promises himself he will one day make a film about what he saw. This scene, which refers to the massacre of Algerians in Paris (October 17, 1961), powerfully symbolizes the importation of the criminal mindset that fueled the French army’s intervention in Algeria. It reminds us of the reality of extreme violence, still present in collective memory and yet never acknowledged by a France that continues to deny its responsibility. A denunciation of the self-censorship of French filmmakers in the 1960s and ’70s when facing the reality of state racism.

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.

Filmed by Bruno Muel, La Caravelle captures the testimony of a French governess teaching at an orphanage in Tunisia, who recounts the traumatic memories of one of her young Algerian students.