Dreams have no titles

1962, at the end of the Algerian War, Algerian independence activists are released from Rennes prison. For one night, filmmaker Yann Le Masson films them. They tell him their vision for the future of Algeria and the place women must occupy in the new society to be built. Fifty years later, with the soundtrack missing, Raphaël Pillosio sets out to find these women. Two deaf people set about lip-reading the women filmed by Yann Le Masson, revealing snatches of sentences, words cut short by the camera's shifts. An investigative film in which the few activists still alive discover their old testimonies and tell us their silent story. The reconstruction of the lost soundtrack will remain in suspense; no happy ending will come to absorb the absence, to cancel the ferocious operation of time. An essay film about cinema that depicts their disappearance, and forever keeps them alive.

Charles de Gaulle, the first president (1958-1969) of the Vth Republic, France’s current system of government, left his mark on the country . He was statesman of action and has been compared to a monarch. This film depicts the general’s personality through the great events of his presidential term, at a time when the world was undergoing considerable changes.

In 1963, Rosans, a village in the Hautes-Alpes region depopulated by the rural exodus, welcomed Harkis (military soldiers) forced to leave Algeria for supporting France during the Algerian War. Around thirty families settled in a camp below Rosans. Nearly half a century after their arrival, first- and second-generation Harkis and native Rosanais recount their experiences of this culture clash, often painful, sometimes happy. Language barriers, religious differences, living in barracks for 14 years, and unemployment were all obstacles to overcome in order to be accepted and then achieve mutual enrichment. Enriched with archive footage to explain the historical context of the time, the film seeks above all to express feelings and unspoken words.

Three demonstrators from October 17, 1961, and a journalist recount the peaceful success of the demonstration and its brutal repression in the streets of Paris. Five months before the end of the Algerian War, the Gaullist government violently suppressed (40 to 300 deaths in a single evening, according to various sources) a peaceful demonstration by the entire Algerian civilian population of the Paris region, protesting the curfew imposed solely on this population (all participants held French citizenship). The government long denied this state crime; the official version: 3 deaths! In 1962, these events were granted amnesty by a simple decree (later enacted into law) issued by the same Gaullist government.

On October 17, 1961, in response to the curfew imposed on Muslim Algerians by Paris police prefect Maurice Papon, the FLN Federation of France organized a peaceful demonstration in the streets of the capital. The demonstration turned into a bloody crackdown: unprecedented violence, thousands of arrests, hundreds missing, and dozens dead. Today, much is known about the violence of that night: at least 200 Algerians were killed, beheaded, beaten, or thrown into the Seine; 11,500 others were arrested and often tortured. Hundreds were deported back to Algeria. Long silenced, the repression has been acknowledged thanks to the work of remembrance and eyewitness accounts.

On October 17 and 18, 1961, during a non-violent demonstration against the imposed curfew, dozens of Algerians were murdered in Paris by police officers acting on orders from their superiors. For forty years, this crime has been concealed; yet these events, the deadliest on French soil since the Second World War, resemble, in some respects, the darkest hours of the collaboration. Why has this history been hidden? Under what conditions, and in the name of what reasons, did officials of a democratic state conceal the scale and gravity of such events?

This documentary bears witness to the events that took place more than thirty years before the filming of this movie, on October 17, 1961, in Paris, during the Algerian War. It is a work not only about historical truth but also about memory. Constructed primarily from interviews conducted with those involved in the events, along with archival footage, photographs, and radio broadcasts from the time, our investigation proves that nearly 200 Algerians were killed (drowned, tortured) that night and in the days that followed by the French police. "A Missing Day" seeks to ask two key questions: how could such events have unfolded in the capital of a Western democracy barely thirty years ago? And why have they been silenced ever since?

Illustrated with archival photographs, animations and live action, this film explores the history and historical and spiritual heritage of Emir Abd El-Kader. Algerian leader of the 19th century, was admired by Abraham Lincoln and celebrated to this day by the Red Cross as a great humanitarian. Emir Abd el-Kader, the man who challenged the French armies from 1832 to 1847 before creating the bases of a real Algerian state, is today considered by independent Algeria as one of the most outstanding figures. of its history. The nobility of his attitude after his capture and the very effective protection he brought to the Christians of Damascus at the end of his life also earned him great prestige among his former adversaries. A documentary told in dialectal Arabic by the voice of Amazigh Kateb.

From 1954 to 1962, during the Algerian War, French citizens provided concrete assistance to the FLN in France: sheltering refugees, forging documents, facilitating border crossings, and transporting funds. Whether committed to the ideals of the Republic or driven by Third Worldist revolutionaries, they sought to build a bridge of friendship between nations. They paid for their commitment with imprisonment and exile. Four veterans of the Jeanson network recall this period. Today, they are no longer seen as traitors or heroes, but as witnesses recounting "their" war... Silent for 30 years, the "Jeanson network" now bears witness to this history.

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 .

“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”.

In 1994, at over seventy years old, Gilberte and William Sportisse, threatened by the FIS, arrived from Algeria. Of Jewish faith, he of Arabic mother tongue, they formed a fighting couple, started for the independence of Algeria, always with an unshakeable faith in humanity. They enjoy recounting the participation of Algerian Jews in the Second World War and the struggle for Algerian independence. They provide us with previously unpublished information on the public and clandestine struggles of the Algerian Communist Party before and after independence, and on the repression of activists who, like William and Gilberte Sportisse, were tortured and imprisoned after Colonel Boumédiène came to power. The film is an ode to understanding between people of different origins or cultures and a tribute to a couple whose youthful character and enthusiasm still astonish.

It's the unforgivable story of the two hundred thousands harkis, the Arabs who fought alongside the French in the bitter Algerian war, from 1954 to 1962. Why did they make that choice? Why were they slaughtered after Algeria's independence? Why were they abandonned by the French government? Some fifty to sixty thousands were saved and transferred in France, often at pitiful conditions. This is for the first time, the story of this tragedy, told in the brilliant style of the authors of "Apocalypse".

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.

Guerre aux images en Algérie

Documentary edited from testimonies on the torture of people who experienced the war. Some witnesses were tortured by Jean-Marie Le Pen. These testimonies will help defend the newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné in court against Jean-Marie Le Pen for defamation. The film was shown in 1985 during the trial and some witnesses also came to support the newspaper. But the 1963 amnesty law protects the politician, prohibiting the use of images that could harm people who served during the Algerian war.

On October 4, 2018, France celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Fifth Republic. It is a republic born in the throes of the Algerian War and one which—from the day it was founded by General de Gaulle until the presidency of a very Jupiterian Emmanuel Macron—has been assailed as a “Republican monarchy” by partisans of a more assertive parliamentarian state. By revisiting the struggle of those who dared oppose the new regime — only to suffer a crushing defeat on September 28, 1958, when they were barely able to garner 20% of the vote against the constitutional text — this film shines a powerful new light on the origins of the Fifth Republic and its consequences for the next 60 years. It is a constitutional debate that planted the seeds for a complete upheaval of the French political landscape, on the left in particular, and set the country in motion toward what would be called the Union of the Left.

Cheikh Djemaï looks back on the genesis of Gillo Pontecorvo’s feature film, The Battle of Algiers (1965). Through archive images, extracts from the film and interviews with personalities, the filmmaker retraces the journey of a major work - from the events of the Algiers Casbah (1956-1957) to the presentation of the Lion of 'Or causing the anger of the French delegation in Venice - which left its mark as much in the history of cinema as in that of Algeria.

On November 1, 1954, the National Liberation Front of Algeria announced the war for the country's independence. France, colonizer since 1830, hastened to reinforce its military contingent in the four corners of the country and to prevent the advance of the rebels. A little Chaoui, born in a mountainous region of the country, sees his placid childhood collapse in the middle of a crossfire that he does not understand. The story, inspired by real testimonies, is constructed with images from the archives of the French army. From this apparently dissociated dialogue between image and word arises a sensitive homage to the memory that rests in the archives and to the ignored voice of its protagonists.

This documentary by director Claire Billet and historian Christophe Lafaye details the massive and systematic use of chemical weapons during the Algerian War. Algerian fighters and civilians, sheltering in caves, were gassed by "special weapons sections" of the French army. The gas identified on military documents is CN2D, whose widespread use forced insurgents to flee "treated" sites, at the risk of dying there. The method is reminiscent of the "enfumades" used by the French expeditionary force during the conquest of Algeria in the 19th century. Between 8,000 and 10,000 such operations are believed to have taken place on Algerian soil between 1956 and 1962. This historical aspect is little known due to the difficulty of accessing archives, many of which are still classified, raising questions about memory, historical truth, and justice.