Between 1877 and 1930, governments and private entrepreneurs organized in several European and American cities real Human Zoos, in which men and women of other races and cultures were exhibited in cardboard sets, separated by moats and fences, suffering a humiliating climate and conditions. They are the possessions of the Empire. The success is enormous, the public crowds to see face to face the "other" turned into an object.

Paris Couleurs, a compilation of archival film material, deals with the image of the migrant in cinema and television throughout the century. From ”Zoos Humains” to the mythical ”Black-Blanc-Beur” of the year 1998, the film follows a history of representation, clichés and stereotypes. With this film Pascal Blanchard and Eric Deroo present a new audiovisual version of their research program “from the native to the immigrant” and their point of view of the relation between colonial history and the history of immigration.

Treichville is a poor suburb of Abidjah, the capital of Ivory Coast and the destination of the two protagonists in this docudrama by Jean Rouch. The two men in question are originally from Nigeria, and they call themselves Eddie Constantine and Edward G. Robinson, clear indications of who their heroes are. The perpetual conflict between traditional ways of life and new Western imports comes up several times as the two men continue on their daily rounds and reveal a little about their hopes for the future.

In Italian Somalia in 1934, a powerful colonist is running a vast estate with many indigenous workers, helped by a young, energetic and well-liked overseer. Then the colonist's beautiful, innocent daughter who had remained in her home country arrives, eager to experience the romance of Africa, full of exotic animals and human beings with strange, delightfully primitive customs. The young people fall in love, but the landowner vehemently rejects what he sees as an inappropriate match. The young overseer leaves and finds consolation in the arms of a beautiful native woman, but the tribe and her husband strongly and tragically oppose this.

This collaborative film, banned for more than a decade by French censors as an attack on French colonialism (and now available only in shortened form), is a deeply felt study of African art and the decline it underwent as a result of its contact with Western civilization. Marker's characteristically witty and thoughtful commentary is combined with images of a stark formal beauty in this passionate outcry against the fate of an art that was once integral to communal life but became debased as it fell victim to the demands of another culture.

“My grandmother was born in what is now Burkina Faso, as a result of an encounter between a French soldier and a young African woman. The discovery of the unique fate of the mixed-race minority to which she belongs, as they were separated from their mothers, abandoned by their fathers and finally confined in orphanages, returns me to my own mixed-race identity.” Available online until November 19th 2021.

On the first of November 1954, “Bloody All Saints Day” exploded in a series of attacks throughout Algeria carried out by what would later become the National Liberation Front. It was the start of the Algerian war. The first film made about this conflict became the first indispensable documentary about the Algerian war. It includes unforgettable testimonies and archives to that allow us to “dare to look at the truth head on". In the rigorous search for historical truth, the authors committed themselves to understanding the different parts of the conflicts, such as the "pieds-noirs", the career soldiers, the Harkis, the Fellaghas, the civil population... Yves Couriere, writer and journalist, has followed all the major stages of the Algerian drama, on the field, between 1958 and 1963. Before making this film, from 1967 to 1971, he published a four-volume history, the first, of the Algerian war.