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.
Dawn of the Damned (1965) is currently not available on any services.
Mouloud Mammeri , Mohamed Chouikh , René Vautier , Ahmed Rachedi , Mazouz Ould-Abderrahmane , Sid Ahmed Agoumi
Ahmed Rachedi
Centre National du Cinéma Algérien (CNCA)
