Banned French Film to get Irish Premiere at Bloody Sunday Commemoration weekend

international | anti-war / imperialism | news report Monday January 25, 2010 13:39 by Shane OCurry

Film dealing with massacre of Algerians to precede discussion on state massacres and the truth

Saturday 30th January will see the Irish premiere – indeed the first screening in the English-speaking world – of the 1962 film Octobre a Paris [October in Paris] by Jacques Panijel.

The film got its first and only screening in Paris in May 1962, immediately after which the film club where it was being shown was raided by Police and the film seized. Other 16 mm copies being screened around France were seized in the following days. Later in that summer Panijel did manage to get Octobre a Paris shown at the Venice Film Festival, but soon after the film would disappear, not to re-surface for over forty years.

The film is a first-hand account, using eye-witness testimonies and original footage, of the 17 October 1961 massacre in Paris and the events leading up to it.

Mass arrests of Algerians at Puteaux, 17 Oct 1961

On 17 October 1961, Algeria's National Liberation Front, the FLN, defied France's Emergency Powers Act and called tens of thousands of Algerian immigrant workers onto the streets of Paris, to take part in a peaceful demonstration calling for recognition of Algeria's right to self-determination and for peace negotiations with the FLN. French police, under the orders from President De Gaulle's appointed Police Prefect Maurice Papon, attacked marchers with calculated brutality. During this attack thousands were savagely beaten and dozens killed, having been thrown or forced to jump in the river Seine. Thousands were rounded up and interned, many in the same detention centres that the Nazis had held Jews in before transportation to Germany less than 2 decades before.

Inside the police stations Police Prefect Papon had given license to the Police and special Auxiliary units, specially recruited to deal with the “Algerian problem”, and a four-day orgy of torture, including water boarding, and assassination ensued. More bodies were dumped in the Seine, which ran red with blood. The French state, which to this day denies any responsibility, admitted 4 deaths at the time but now officially says that 40 people were killed. More credible estimates, from eyewitnesses, archives and the number of bodies found in the river and graves put the number at more than 200.

Former Paris Police Prefect Maurice Papon died in 2007, having been convicted in 1998 of crimes against humanity for ordering the transportation between 1942 and 44 of over 1600 French Jews to Germany from Bordeaux, where he had been Prefect of Police for the notorious Vichy regime. At his trial, a key witness against Papon was respected historian Jean-Luc Einaudi, who will be in Derry to discuss the 1961 massacre after the screening. Einaudi was able to prove in court that it was Papon who had directed the massacre of the 200+ Algerians in October 1961. This is the closest that the French state has come to acknowledging the massacre.

Director Jacques Panijel, an academic and former resistance fighter against the Nazis, began using film to document the French state’s use of torture and assassination after Paratroopers in Algeria had murdered his university colleague Maurice Audin in 1957. In 1962, after the raids, he is said to have had only two 16 mm copies of Octobre a Paris, one of which was kept in a ‘safe house’ in France. The second was sent with the FLN to a newly independent Algeria, where it was assumed it would be safe. Ironically, it is the latter one that ‘disappeared’. The first one re-surfaced in 2002 when it was shown as part of a historical series.

Octobre a Paris is being premiered in Derry, having been translated and subtitled for the first time, as part of the Bloody Sunday week-end commemorations. It is being screened at 10 am sharp on Saturday 30th January, in Seomra 2 at the Culturlann, Gt James Street.

It will be followed by a panel discussion involving Jean Luc Einaudi, the historian who has been championing the case for acknowledging the truth about the 17 October 1961 massacre, Andree Murphy from Relatives for Justice, on the 1971 massacre in Ballymurphy, Belfast, by British Paratroopers and Eamonn McCann, from the Bloody Sunday Trust, on Bloody Sunday.

Internees in sports stadium where the Nazis had previously processed Jews

Pont Saint Michel, right beside the central Police station in central Paris: "They drown Algerians Here"

Algerians being transported