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.

Mecca. The new King of Iraq. For decades, Movietone was one of the major international news broadcasting agencies. It shaped the collective imaginary, created by the mass media, of a large cross-section of Americans and Europeans.

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 global capitalism, the movement of bodies through borders takes the form of an asymmetrical dualism. One side of the border acts as a retaining wall, a knife that cuts territories, bodies, and genders. It is not driven to block access to the central zones of capital, but to bureaucratically manage the legality of the migratory flow, forking it into being and non-being. The other side of the border adopts a flexible interface, expanding endlessly in the space of the “other”, while preserving the impermeability of knowledge and identities. The border has ceased to be a peripheral space, it becomes centre. Its implosion is expressed in a whole range of institutions, security devices, and parallel agencies that inhabit our cities, forming an expanding inner border. The logic of the border is now spreading to all systems of political and cognitive power. In this sense, we can speak of borders as laboratories for a new totalitarian system. Proclamations that were once the domain of openly racist sectarian groups are now being absorbed into governmental and media discourse. Colonialism is also a state of the soul, based on alterity in constant opposition. Always an “other” to criticise, occupy, conquer... never loving contemplation or dialogue for the transformation of being... being without borders.

La France est un Empire is a fresco on the grandeur of France. A film that proudly recounts the history of the creation of the French empire in less than a century (from 1814 to 1912). Propaganda with a clear conscience in regards to how France embarked on the civilizing mission that it had imposed on itself, and all the benefits that ensued from the colonisation of the “natives.” In this sense, it is an almost ethnographic testimony on how France saw itself on the eve of WWII. Seventy years on, the illusion has not dissipated, which is why Sandrine Lemaire's lucid analysis is so important in terms of restoring the truth about this adventure.

The story of a failed encounter between two cultures with different sensitivities and fantasies. This led to colonisation - one marked by brutality - despite the fact that wars, chaos and destruction could have been avoided. Based on archive footage, the film sends a chant echoing infinitely through time and space: "France is our homeland".