Dawn of the Damned
MovieTitle | L'Aube des Damnés |
User score | 7.2 |
Release date | Jul 5, 1965 |
Genre | Documentary, History, Drama |
Director | Ahmed Rachedi |
Production country | Algeria |
Production companies | Centre National du Cinéma Algérien (CNCA) |
Run time | 85 min. |
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.