On October 17, 1961, during a demonstration called by the FLN, dozens of Algerians were killed by the police forces under Prefect Maurice Papon. The very next day after the demonstration, Jacques Panijel began filming October in Paris to alert the public to the massacre that had just taken place in the streets of the capital. Composed of documentary footage, interviews with demonstrators, and reenactments of the events, the film was censored as early as 1962, and Jacques Panijel was threatened with prosecution. Long banned, screened in Paris in May 1968 alongside Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, Jacques Panijel’s film would not receive its distribution license until 1973, following a hunger strike by René Vautier. But its director long refused to screen it until a preamble in the form of a foreword was added, a process that required subsidies that had remained unavailable until then. October in Paris will be released for the first time in France on October 19, 2011. Even most history books fail to mention the film when discussing the Algerian War…
Fifty years ago, the Prefect of Police for the Seine, Maurice Papon, with the approval of the government of the time, imposed a discriminatory curfew targeting exclusively all French Muslims from Algeria. This racist curfew sparked, at the call of the FLN’s French Federation, a peaceful response in the form of a large demonstration in the streets of Paris. On the evening of Tuesday, October 17, nearly thirty thousand Algerians—men, women, and children—peacefully demonstrated on the capital’s main thoroughfares to assert their right to equality and their country’s independence. A brutal crackdown followed, concealed from public view for many years. Eleven thousand arrests, dozens of murders, including many demonstrators thrown into the Seine after being beaten. Hundreds of deportations and complaints that went unresolved.