Happy Birthday to the National Front! For a long time, driven by the need to establish a dialogue around the Algerian War, René Vautier recorded the testimonies of Algerian independence activists, French conscripts and reservists, generals of the French army, historians... Thus, Mohamed Moulay, Ali Rouchaï, Mohamed Loulli, Germaine Tillion, Paul Teitgen, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Colonel Antoine Argoud, General de Bollardière, and General Jacques Massu, among others, gave their testimony before Vautier’s camera. A documentary long unseen that reminds us where the National Front comes from, which changed its name and gained some respectability after Jean-Marie Le Pen’s leadership. Warning: The film is a rescued copy. The technical quality is degraded, but that is only a detail... The Man with Bloody Hands (by René Vautier) I had embarked on a historical project: recording on video tapes the “memories” of witnesses of the Algerian War, so that one day young students from France and Algeria could write together, in images, a common history of the relations between the two peoples. I was told about a man, in Saint-Eugène, who, despite having been tortured, had trouble asserting his pension rights because he had never been a member of the FLN. I interviewed him somewhat by chance: he told me about his tortures, and how, between sessions of “gégène” (electric torture) and “bathtub” (immersion torture), his torturers had pushed his thumbs into his eye sockets: “as if they wanted to make my eyes pop out.” Then I did what I always did: showed him a series of photos of paratrooper officers, to ask if he recognized his torturers. Very dignifiedly, he told me he could no longer see... but he added: “I have a paper from Mr. Mayor (the mayor of Algiers at the time was Jacques Chevalier, former Minister of Defense under Mendès-France) where the name of the paratrooper lieutenant is written.” That’s how I saw that the name he couldn’t read — he had gone blind due to the tortures — was that of Lieutenant Le Pen. I had Jacques Chevalier’s signature authenticated by his family members and people who had worked with him; I checked documents from the time — there was no doubt. Apparently, there is a law in France forbidding the use of testimonies about atrocities committed during the Algerian War. Let’s not be ridiculous: Austrians are suspected of putting at the head of their republic a man accused of having “covered up” tortures, and yet we should hide from the French documents that the whole world will feast on during the presidential elections? Because no law can prevent the whole world — except France! — from knowing that we will have a candidate not only with delirious statements but with bloody hands. This article was published in L’Humanité on September 29, 1987.

Interview with historian Jacques Choukroun (bonus material from the DVD René Vautier in Algeria), focusing on the role of independent Algeria in Africa during the 1960s, as well as René Vautier's presence in post-independence Algeria — “the loudspeaker of peoples in struggle,” as the Breton filmmaker with the red camera was called. The discussion touches on: the Bandung Conference, the historic newspaper Révolution Africaine, pan-Africanism, Bouteflika’s role, and the 1965 coup d’état.

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.

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".

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.

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.