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.

An unemployed Algerian worker leaves Paris hitchhiking. He soon reaches Brittany and, captivated by the beauty of the wild gorse, ends up setting himself up as a gorse vendor. But because of parking issues with his small cart, he has a rough run‑in with a policeman, who reacts violently and overturns the cart, scattering the flowers. The intervention of some factory workers, and the warm solidarity they show him, saves him from despair. A poetic and humorous fable in which an Algerian immigrant travels across Brittany in search of work. He finds a cart and begins selling gorse in a small town. When a policeman violently knocks over his cart, the flowers spill onto the ground. At the factory gates, the women workers, as a sign of solidarity, pick them up one by one and buy them from him. The film won the Anti‑Racist Film Award granted by the Amicale of Immigrant Workers’ Associations in Europe in 1970.

In 1962, René Vautier, together with some Algerian friends, organized an audiovisual formation center to encourage a “dialogue in images” between the two factions. A film was edited from that experience, but the French police partially destroyed it. The images that were saved represent an unprecedented historical document: They tell of the Algerian War and the history of the ALN (National Liberation Army), as well as showing life after the war and, particularly, the reconstruction of the cities and the countryside after the war of Independence. It is the first film from independent Algeria Dirección y fotografía | Réalisation et image | Directors and cinematographers René Vautier Ahmed Rachedi Nacer Guenifi Héléna Sanchez Sidi Boumédienne Mohamed Guennez Allal Yahiaoui Mohamed Bouamari André Dumaître Taïbi Mustapha Bellil

At the award ceremony for the Collar of the Hermine in Pontivy in September 2000, René Vautier was confronted by Claudine Dupont-Tingaud, a former regional councilor for the National Front and ex-OAS activist. With sharp wit and humor, Vautier tore apart her arguments, and in the end, she walked out of the room under a chorus of boos from the audience.

The video departs from the idea of symbolizing the material, physical and emotional exploitation in which colonization was based and embedded by the robbery of the Alger’s port by The French Colonial troupes. Taking into an account the personal and subjective experience of the city of Algiers, a double narration is built by the artist and an Algerian collaborator (Ahmed Chaabi) weaving between both a portrait of personal and historical feelings of the place. A poem of love about domination and mistrust, about everything we want to know in depth but that we know impossible to understand in its entirety, what the Kasbah had represented yesterday and what it is today, its myths and its realities, and an uncertain future that we all share under the threat of globalization. More than any other district of Algiers, the Kasbah represents the “otherness”. Its winding streets are a labyrinth to the unknown where you want to get lost and where, at the same time, you are afraid of being lost. An unknown world, even for the Algerians, where the real plays to hide.

A cooperative technician recalls his "technical work" when, during the Algerian conflict, he was installing mines that still kill many civilians. A preliminary essay to the filming of Avoir vingt ans dans les Aurès: a fiction built from testimonies of conscripted soldiers in Algeria.