René Vautier

France

René Vautier (1928-2015) is the most censored filmmaker in the history of French cinema.
A rebel and activist, he always strove to make "images and sound available to those denied them by the powers that be". And it was not without risk that he fought with his citizen's camera to bear witness to the struggles of his time, and always tried to establish a dialogue in images to act on conflicts.
Afrique 50, the first French anti-colonial film, inaugurated Vautier's struggle. Camera in hand, he definitively chose his side: to be on the other side, to face up to it. It was finally with a fiction film that he won international recognition at the Cannes Film Festival in 1972 for Avoir 20 ans dans les Aurès. A crucial witness to his times, René Vautier was always one step ahead of history. A few years after the Evian Accords, André Malraux said: "René Vautier is a Frenchman who saw things before anyone else".
Even today, his films echo current events, becoming extraordinarily diverse archives (documentary, fiction, short and feature-length) that shed light on contemporary history and put today's crises into perspective by studying the struggles of the past.
René Vautier was censored for virtually all his work.