A Reading
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“I say what I see, what I know, what is true.” With this verse by Paul Éluard, René Vautier understood cinema as a way of being in the world. His films and writings emerge from direct experience, an inexhaustible curiosity, and a profound trust in the power of images and words to accompany struggles for justice.
Reading René Vautier means being carried along by an extraordinary storyteller. With humour, irony and remarkable clarity, he transforms every adventure, every encounter and every act of resistance into an invitation to look differently. His memoirs trace a life marked by censorship, imprisonment and anti-colonial revolutions, while also bearing witness to a collective understanding of cinema, friendship and commitment. A filmmaker who never stopped standing alongside those who resisted, convinced that cinema could be a tool for understanding the world and helping to transform it.
With the publication of Cine Disidencia. Memorias de René Vautier, we continue to expand the research project Art, War, and Insurrection: René Vautier the Indomitable, an ongoing initiative by OVNI that keeps recovering materials, fostering encounters and sharing a body of work that continues to engage with the struggles, conflicts and questions of our present.
Cine Disidencia. Memorias de René Vautier, co-edited and published by Dirección Única Editorial, brings together for the first time in Spanish the writings and memoirs of one of the freest and most uncompromising filmmakers of the twentieth century.
René Vautier (1928–2015) understood cinema as a tool for social intervention and as an instrument placed at the service of those who had no voice. From Afrique 50 (1950), considered the first French anti-colonial film, to his work alongside workers’, peasants’ and anti-colonial struggles, his entire career was marked by censorship, clandestinity and an unwavering commitment to filming what those in power sought to keep invisible.
The publication is part of the research project Arte, Guerra, Insumisión: René Vautier el indomable, an initiative led by Falconetti Peña and Simona Malatesta for OVNI, in collaboration with Vicente Barbarroja. The project continues to grow through close collaboration with Moïra Vautier, daughter of René Vautier, whose generosity, commitment and active involvement in the research have been essential in recovering new materials, deepening the research, and expanding the dissemination of her father's work and thought.
Through screenings, publications, conversations and new materials, the project remains open, creating spaces for encounter from which to rethink the relationships between cinema, memory, anti-colonialism and resistance.