Eight portraits, eight dreams, eight escapes.

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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.