Dawn of the Damned (1965)

• 65%
• 1965
• Documentary
• Drama
• History
• Ahmed Rachedi
• Mouloud Mammeri
• Mohamed Chouikh
• René Vautier

This excellent feature-length documentary - the story of the imperialist colonization of Africa - is a film about death. Its most shocking sequences derive from the captured French film archives in Algeria containing - unbelievably - masses of French-shot documentary footage of their tortures, massacres and executions of Algerians. The real death of children, passers-by, resistance fighters, one after the other, becomes unbearable. Rather than be blatant propaganda, the film convinces entirely by its visual evidence, constituting an object lesson for revolutionary cinema.