René Vautier
1969.
France.
vo French.
5’
In the early 1960s, in Salisbury (present-day Harare), in Southern Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), the government of Ian Smith hanged three black revolutionaries who had been pardoned by the Queen of England. René Vautier, together with ZAPU (Zimbabwe African Party for Unity), denounced the assassination. Expelled by the Rhodesian police (who had received information from the French secret services), the filmmaker went to Algeria to shoot a film in the form of an allegation against colonial savagery. The film was initially banned in France, but was authorized in 1970, it seems that in England it was never authorized.
A poem written by René Vautier (under the Algerian pseudonym Férid Dendeni), read by the future Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty, paintings by the South African painter Gerard Sekoto, a soundtrack donated by members of the Black Panthers exiled in Algiers (a slow funeral march composed to accompany the funeral of a black man killed during the struggle for civil rights in the United States), masks and statuettes of black art. Unable to make his usual live-action film, Vautier improvised a magnificent filmic poem.
https://www.lesmutins.org/rene-vautier-anticolonialiste-17