Last week at the college cinematheque in Columbia:
Octobre à Paris (October in Paris)
Jacques Panijel, 1962, 70 min. French with English subtitles
Screening followed by a discussion with Madeleine Dobie, Nicole Beth Wallenbrock, and Jihad Azahrai
On the night of October 17, 1961, Parisian police brutally repressed a peaceful demonstration of Algerians protesting France’s colonial war in Algeria. Dozens were killed—some beaten, others drowned in the Seine—while the French state imposed a strict silence on the massacre. Octobre à Paris, directed by Jacques Panijel, was one of the first attempts to break that silence, weaving together first hand testimonies, archival documents, and reconstructed scenes to bear witness to a tragedy the authorities sought to erase.
Completed in 1962, Octobre à Paris was immediately banned by French censors, and it would take over a decade for the ban to be lifted. Today, Panijel’s film stands as a landmark of militant cinema and a courageous act of historical memory.
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