In the name of civilization

For official history and public opinion, Libya was simply “a box of sand that the colonists had transformed into a verdant garden criss-crossed with roads.” By analyzing texts, archives and films, Muftâh ech-Cherif and Boughaleb Bouriki set out to reveal the realities of a “twenty-year military march”, begun in 1911, and which met with stubborn resistance. Fascism had to deploy considerable military resources to bring the entire country under Italian rule. Summary executions, concentration camps and expropriation are all part of a carefully veiled history in Libya and elsewhere, which this film reveals for the first time.