Death of anticolonial committed filmmaker René Vautier – The Obs

Rennes (AFP) – The director René Vautier, died Sunday at age 86 in Britain, was a leading figure of the committed cinema, denouncing torture, colonialism and the war in Algeria, a conflict in the heart of the movie most famously, “To Be Twenty in the Aures.”

Born January 15, 1928 in Camaret-sur-Mer (Finistère), the eternal rebel in sparkling eyes and shock of white hair, is claimed as “the French filmmaker’s most censored” its disturbing films often been banned.

“René Vautier was a committed filmmaker ever there was a time when censorship was watching. It was a right, “he told AFP Gilles Jacob, former president of the Cannes Film Festival.

The Culture Minister Fleur Pellerin paid tribute to a” filmmaker without concessions against the current and often censored “. “Always at the forefront of social struggles, he scored all his work in the fight against racism and injustice,” she said.

This man image for eventful life, which saw the leak, imprisonment, hunger strikes, threats and condemnations, has directed dozens of films and documentaries on the war in Algeria.

Among them “Nation of Algeria” (1954), which led to his being charged with “undermining the internal security of the state” because there stated that “Algeria will be independent of any” and “in Algeria flames “(1958), shot in the bush. It will then form the first generation of Algerian filmmakers.

But his most famous work on the subject is “To Be Twenty in the Aures,” an anti-colonialist load tracing the route known as Breton in the Algerian quagmire . Based on the hearings 600 conscripts, he will be rewarded at Cannes in 1972 by the International Critics Award.

The film “went around the world, but I was ashamed not being able to meet people who ask me ‘how is it that French filmmakers were not able make a film about the war in Algeria? “, told René Vautier in January 2001, in an interview to the newspaper Humanity

-. “the reign of vultures” –

He was also the director of “Africa 50″, a short film made at age 20, became the first anticolonial film French cinema when it was at the start of a command to promote the educational mission of the French in the colonies. The firebrand who denounces the lack of teachers and the crimes committed by the French army, was censored for forty years and earned its author sentenced to one year in prison.

“Friends, colonization c is the reign of vultures, “it starts in an angry voice René Vautier, who then hid in the Dogon country to save the reels of film censorship before being imprisoned.

In 1997, the Foreign Ministry officially confiscated handed him a copy of “Africa 50″ now projected abroad, had he told AFP. On French television, the film was released in 2008.

In January 1973, the filmmaker conducted a hunger strike a month to protest against “the judgment on the content political films supported by the censor board “, after the ban of the film” October in Paris “by Jacques Panijel on the bloody repression, October 17, 1961, a demonstration for independence Algerians in Paris.

René Vautier, a graduate of the Institute for Advanced Film Studies in 1946, also focused his gaze on the workers’ struggles, focusing particularly in 1973, “Transmission of working experience” of the workers made redundant forges of Hennebont (Morbihan).

The political commitment of René Vautier, who lived in Cancale (Ille-et-Vilaine), dates back to his participation, at 15, to the Resistance in Finistere . Need to use a grenade, I told myself that I will never serve me a weapon, “he told AFP in 2008.