“Le cercle des noyés” (The circle of the drowned men) is the name given to a group of black political prisoners in Mauritania who were arrested in 1986 and incarcerated in the city of Oulata's former Colonial Fort. The documentary follows the subtle mental process of one of the ex-prisoners as he remembers his own story and that of his fellow prisoners. Like an echo, we see a series of images of the sites of their confinement – bare, stripped of all traces of this past.

In 2012, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Algerian independence and the theatrical re-release of the restored version of the film "Avoir 20 ans dans les Aurès", René Vautier looks back on his career as a filmmaker involved in anti-colonial struggles.