La France est notre patrie

Like a historian, Rithy Panh sets himself the challenge of revisiting images filmed by the French in their former colonies, and reinterpreting them. Amateur films, home movies, ethnographic documentaries, news reels, propaganda films, etc. – all kinds of images that contributed to the construction of colonial France’s “great fatherland”, and now conserved in various archives as part of French film heritage. In this film, made entirely with archive footage and no voice-over, Panh’s editing hijacks the images to reveal all their violence and all the savagery of colonialism. JQ