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.

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.

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 The images that were saved represent an unprecedented historical document: They tell of the Algerian War and the history of the ALN (National Liberation Army), as well as showing life after the war and, particularly, the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

When independence came, the owners of the big boats decided to sell up, so many small-scale fishermen soon found themselves out of work. Their wives decided to pool their gold rings and sell them to buy new boats.

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 the early 1960s, in Salisbury (present-day Harare), in Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), the government of Ian Smith hanged three black revolutionaries who had been pardoned by the Queen of England. René Vautier, together with ZAPU (Zimbabwe African Party for Unity), denounced the assassination. Expelled by the Rhodesian police (who had received information from the French secret services), the filmmaker went to Algeria to shoot a film in the form of an allegation against colonial savagery. The film was initially banned in France, but was authorized in 1970, it seems that in England it was never authorized. A poem written by René Vautier (under the Algerian pseudonym Férid Dendeni), read by the future Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty, paintings by the South African painter Gerard Sekoto, a soundtrack donated by members of the Black Panthers exiled in Algiers (a slow funeral march composed to accompany the funeral of a black man killed during the struggle for civil rights in the United States), masks and statuettes of black art. Unable to make his usual live-action film, Vautier improvised a magnificent filmic poem.

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.

In Guerre aux images en Algérie (War on Images in Algeria), René Vautier revisits the footage from Algérie en flammes (Algeria in Flames), shot alongside Algerian fighters in the ALN maquis in late 1956 and throughout 1957. These war images, filmed in the Aurès-Nementchas region, were meant to serve as a basis for dialogue between French and Algerians in the pursuit of peace in Algeria. They show the presence of an armed organization close to the people. In Guerre aux images en Algérie, Vautier sheds light, in 1985, on the context and often dramatic conditions in which the film was made.

Frontline is a documentary by René Vautier about apartheid in South Africa, made at a time when almost no films addressed the subject. Banned for twenty years in France, the film offers a unique and powerful historical testimony. Through interviews, archival footage, and critical commentary, Vautier denounces the brutality of the South African regime and the complicit silence of powers like the United States, France, and the United Kingdom. Figures such as Oliver Tambo and Miriam Makeba give voice to the resistance. The film was conceived not as an artistic work, but as an educational and political tool, reflecting Vautier’s tireless commitment to all struggles against oppression.