Jean-Jacques de Félice, The Passion For Justice(2018)

The Zerda or the Songs of Forgetting(fr)

“La Zerda and the songs of oblivion” (1982) is one of only two films made by the Algerian novelist Assia Djebar, with “La Nouba des femmes du mont Chenoua” (1977). Powerful poetic essay based on archives, in which Assia Djebar – in collaboration with the poet Malek Alloula and the composer Ahmed Essyad – deconstructs the French colonial propaganda of the Pathé-Gaumont newsreels from 1912 to 1942, to reveal the signs of revolt among the subjugated North African population. Through the reassembly of these propaganda images, Djebar recovers the history of the Zerda ceremonies, suggesting that the power and mysticism of this tradition were obliterated and erased by the predatory voyeurism of the colonial gaze. This very gaze is thus subverted and a hidden tradition of resistance and struggle is revealed, against any exoticizing and orientalist temptation.

Five Directors On The Battle of Algiers(en)

This 17-minute documentary is featured on the 3-Disc Criterion Collection DVD of The Battle of Algiers (1966), released in 2004. An in-depth look at the Battle of Algiers through the eyes of five established and accomplished filmmakers; Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh, Oliver Stone, Julian Schnabel and Mira Nair. They discuss how the shots, cinematography, set design, sound and editing directly influenced their own work and how the film's sequences look incredibly realistic, despite the claim that everything in the film was staged .

Camilo: The Long Road to Disobedience(de)

The award-winning filmmaker Peter Lilienthal is dedicated to this extremely poignant documentary of U.S. military policy and the living conditions of former resistance fighters in Latin America.

Clément-Marie Biazin, peintre-conteur africain(fr)

Muñiz, The Argentinian In The Algerian Revolution(es)

Roberto Muniz, nicknamed "Mahmoud the Argentinian," was a revolutionary fighter who joined the National Liberation Army in 1959 to support the Algerian cause in the war of independence against France. He joined a clandestine group that manufactured weapons and ammunition to be transported to Algeria to support the revolution that began in 1954. After the war, the Algerian government invited the mujahid to stay, an offer he accepted to begin a new life as an employee of Sonnelgaz and a member of the General Union of Algerian Workers (UGTA), accompanied by his wife Alfonsa, a textile union activist who came from Argentina to join this North African adventure.

Here and Elsewhere(fr)

Here and Elsewhere takes its name from the contrasting footage it shows of the fedayeen and of a French family watching television at home. Originally shot by the Dziga Vertov Group as a film on Palestinian freedom fighters, Godard later reworked the material alongside Anne-Marie Miéville.

Persona Non Grata(en)

2003 documentary film produced by Oliver Stone for the HBO series America Undercover about the conflict in occupied Palestine. He speaks with Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu, former prime ministers of Israel, Yasser Arafat, late president of the Palestinian National Authority, and various Palestinian activists resisting the oppression of the zionist regime.

Sawt Echaâb(ar)

“La Voix du Peuple,” composed of archival photographs by René Vauthier and others, exposes the root causes of the armed conflict of the Algerian resistance. Participating in a war of real images against French colonial propaganda, these images aimed to show the images that the occupier had censored or distorted, by showing the extortions of the French occupation army: torture, arrests and arbitrary executions, napalm bombings, roundabout fires, erasing entire villages from the map, etc. This is what the French media described as a “pacification campaign”.

Algeria in Flames(ar)

These are the first images shot in the ALN maquis, camera in hand, at the end of 1956 and in 1957. These war images taken in the Aurès-Nementchas are intended to be the basis of a dialogue between French and Algerians for peace in Algeria, by demonstrating the existence of an armed organization close to the people. Three versions of Algeria in Flames are produced: French, German and Arabic. From the end of the editing, the film circulates without any cuts throughout the world, except in France where the first screening takes place in the occupied Sorbonne in 1968. Certain images of the film have circulated and are found in films, in particular Algerian films. Because of the excitement caused by this film, he was forced to go into hiding for 25 months. After the declaration of independence, he founded the first Algerian Audiovisual Center.

Aimé Césaire, un Nègre fondamental(fr)

Colonial Times(es)

Three centuries of Venezuela's history as a Spanish colony are considered from economic, political and social standpoints; evocations of the past are compared to the present. Based on the ideas and research of Federico Brito Figueroa, Alfredo A. Alfonso, Miguel A. Saignes, Josefina Jordan, and Thaelman Urgelles among others.

Dawn of the Damned(fr)

This excellent feature-length documentary - the story of the imperialist colonization of Africa - is a film about death. Its most shocking sequences derive from the captured French film archives in Algeria containing - unbelievably - masses of French-shot documentary footage of their tortures, massacres and executions of Algerians. The real death of children, passers-by, resistance fighters, one after the other, becomes unbearable. Rather than be blatant propaganda, the film convinces entirely by its visual evidence, constituting an object lesson for revolutionary cinema.

CHoosing at Twenty(fr)

Between 1954-1962, one hundred to three hundred young French people refused to participate in the Algerian war. These rebels, soldiers or conscripts were non-violent or anti-colonialists. Some took refuge in Switzerland where Swiss citizens came to their aid, while in France they were condemned as traitors to the country. In 1962, a few months after Independence, Villi Hermann went to a region devastated by war near the Algerian-Moroccan border, to help rebuild a school. In 2016 he returned to Algeria and reunited with his former students. He also met French refractories, now living in France or Switzerland.

Fort Du Conquet Destruction of the Vautier Archives(fr)

Resistance fighter under the occupation, committed to the FLN during the Algerian war, member of the Medvedkine group after May 1968 and defender of Breton autonomy, René Vautier was a committed filmmaker, author of an anti-colonialist work in which he denounces the repression, torture and racism. In 1983, René Vautier discovered, by the light of a flashlight, his films cut up and scattered at Fort du Conquet. Police also came to check the damage.

Afrique 50(fr)

The first French anti-colonialist film, derived from an assignment in which the director was to document educational activities by the French League of Schooling in West Africa. Vautier later filmed what he actually saw: “a lack of teachers and doctors, the crimes committed by the French Army in the name of France, the instrumentalization of the colonized peoples.” For his role in the film, Vautier was imprisoned for several months. The film was banned from public screening for more than 40 years.

Guerre aux images en Algérie(fr)

Portugal: Carnations Against Dictatorship(de)

In Portugal, during the night of April 24-25, 1974, a peaceful uprising put an end to the last government of the Estado Novo, the authoritarian regime established in 1933 by dictator António de Oliveira Salazar (1889-1970), paving the way for full democracy: a chronicle of the Carnation Revolution.

They Joined the Front(fr)

In this film, four key witnesses, who live in Algeria today, as full-fledged Agerians, show us what this colonization was really like, so "beneficial" that they themselves perceived it as the oppression of one people by another. Three of them, who today would be called "pieds noirs," in other words, those Europeans to whom France, the occupying power, gave the best land, taken from the indigenous populations, work, and exclusive rights, not shared by the entire population, lived rather well compared to the majority of the "natives." The fourth was far from all that and lived in Argentina. Annie Steiner, Felix Colozzi, Pierre Chaulet, and Roberto Muniz explain to us what led them to show solidarity with the struggle of the weak, the humiliated, and to risk their freedom and their lives by committing to liberate Algeria.

In the Shade of the Hills(fr)

Amani is 31. When he was an infant, he survived the genocide against Rwanda’s Tutsi population. Three decades later, Amani has set up an organisation in Nyamirambo, one of the more economically impoverished districts of the country’s capital, Kigali. It employs creativity, artistic practice and performance to grapple with poverty and generational trauma – acknowledging that deep-seated ideologies can easily foment prejudice and create an environment that proved so catastrophic in the past.

Frantz Fanon, trajectoire d'un révolté(fr)

Frantz Fanon alone embodies all the issues of French colonial history. Martinican resistance fighter, he enlisted, like millions of colonial soldiers, in the Free Army out of loyalty to France and the idea of freedom that it embodies for him. A writer, he participated in the bubbling life of Saint-Germain with Césaire, Senghor and Sartre, debating tirelessly on the destiny of colonized peoples. As a doctor, he revolutionized the practice of psychiatry, seeking in the relations of domination of colonial societies the foundations of the pathologies of his patients in Blida. Activist, he brings together through his action and his history of him, the anger of peoples crushed by centuries of colonial oppression. But beyond this exceptional journey which makes sensitive the permanence of French colonialism in the Lesser Antilles at the gates of the Algerian desert, he leaves an incomparable body of work which has made him today one of the most studied French authors across the Atlantic.