Week-end à Sochaux

Bruno Muel's documentary on the coup in Chile in 1973. Muel, who was part of the famed Medvedkine group, along with Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard, among others, captured one of the most powerful portraits of the early days of Dictatorship. Profound solidarity with the socialist cause, Muel and his team showed great courage to mix the official registration of images with those triumphant, clandestine, of the nascent opposition.

Documentary on the beginnings of Algerian independence filmed during the summer of 1962 in Algiers. The film was banned in France and Algeria but won the Grand Prize at the Leipzig International Film Festival in 1965. Out of friendship, the production company Images de France sent an operator, Bruno Muel, who later declared: "For those who were called to Algeria (for me, 1956-58), participating in a film on independence was a victory over horror, lies and absurdity. It was also the beginning of my commitment to the cinema."

An unemployed Algerian worker leaves Paris by hitchhiking. He soon found himself in Brittany and, seduced by the beauty of wild gorse, eventually established himself as a gorse merchant. But for problems with parking his little cart, he had a rough explanation with a law enforcement officer. The happy intervention of factory workers, the eager kindness they showed him, saved him from despair. This film is part of a trilogy "Them And Us" with the films "Les 3 Cousins" and "Techniquement Si Simple".

Originally commissioned by the city of Algiers to promote tourism, Mohamed Zinet’s Tahia ya Didou blends documentary with fiction to create a poetic, acerbic and rapturous portrait of the director’s native city. The camera travels freely, through the port, market, streets and cafés, capturing everyday people, some of whom recur frequently enough to seem like protagonists. The nominal plotline follows a French tourist couple’s leisurely visit to the city, the man having previously served in the army during the Algerian war. As they walk around, his comments betray his mindset’s racist colonial prejudices, while his wife reiterates asinine clichés. Their unhurried wandering is interrupted when he comes across a blind man and realises that he tortured him during his army service. The film is punctuated with punchy sequences that show a poet named Momo delivering verse as an elegy for Algiers.

The Three Cousins ​​is a comedy-drama by René Vautier released in 1970 about the living conditions of three Algerian immigrant cousins ​​looking for work in Paris. Housed in a narrow construction shed, the coal stove will cause them to suffocate. The Three Cousins ​​won the Best Human Rights Film Award in Strasbourg in 1970.

The action takes place in a metallurgical factory which was part of the Pechiney-Ugine-Külhman trust in Couëron, Loire-Atlantique, in 1975. To show their solidarity with their husbands on strike, workers' wives invaded the director's office and obtained in two hours what was refused to them for months. But the management complained and sued. Twelve wives were charged with forcible confinement. The mobilization then widened. The women called on the Bretagne Cinema Production Unit (UPCB) to make a film about their struggle. Narrating the courageous action of solidarity of women with the strikers of the factory and the emergence of a collective awareness, both feminist and working-class, the film is also an echo chamber sensitive to the aspirations of the twelve women who were charged.

In seven different parts, Godard, Ivens, Klein, Lelouch, Marker, Resnais, and Varda show their sympathy for the North-Vietnamese army during the Vietnam War.

A documentary look at striking workers in a textile plant in Besançon, France, centering on interviews with workers about their motivations for becoming involved with the union and the struggles of their day to day life.

A follow-up to Be Seeing You (À bientôt, j’espère), this collective work—initiated by Chris Marker and the Medvedkin Group—was made in collaboration with workers at the Yema Watch Factory in Besançon. It follows a female worker who becomes active in labor organizing, depicting everyday struggles and the growing consciousness within the French labor movement.

Festival panafricain d'Alger is a documentary by William Klein of the music and dance festival held 40 years ago in the streets and in venues all across Algiers. Klein follows the preparations, the rehearsals, the concerts… He blends images of interviews made to writers and advocates of the freedom movements with stock images, thus allowing him to touch on such matters as colonialism, neocolonialism, colonial exploitation, the struggles and battles of the revolutionary movements for Independence.

Documentary filmed in 1965 by two journalists in the remote town of Rio Chiquito, Colombia, a self-proclaimed communist "republic." The film shows the live of villagers and guerilleros before and after an attack by Colombian government forces.

A famous documentary about the Peugeot factory in Sochaux in the 1970s. In this region, everything is owned by Peugeot: homes, stores, schools and leisure - there is no escaping it. The production line dictates the rhythm of everyday life: a horrible machine, draining workers' energy and hope.

Witnesses tell of the day the police took over the Peugeot factories in Sochaux on strike for 22 days. Balance: two dead, one hundred and fifty wounded. The first film by Sochaux's Medvedkine group, this film recounts one of the most violent episodes of May 68: the murder of two Peugeot factory workers by a CRS brigade during clashes on June 11, 1968. The film was shown two years later, on June 11, 1970, in a cinema opposite the factory, on the day commemorating the death of the two workers.