Dear Comrades,

I imagine that this is how René Vautier might have started a postcard to his friends and colleagues. He was born in 1928 in Camaret-sur-mer, Departement Finistère, Brittany, and he died in Cancale in 2015, also in Brittany. His film Afrique 50, an anti-colonialist manifesto realised in Mali and the Ivory Coast, was confiscated. He had reason to promote himself as the “most censured” French filmmaker. Many of his films side with the Algerian liberation movement.

A and B, Algeria and Brittany: A nation struggling violently against French Colonialism; a region which lost its independence more than 400 years ago but is marked by a sense of resistance and reservations against the nation state until today. Driving along the coast around Locquirec, the easternmost city of Finistère, we notice that many villages have their town signs turned upside down – a symbolic protest by the farmers against regulation and working conditions.

Vautier’s Brittany films have been published recently as a DVD box with the title “Rouge Bretagne.” Let’s find a moment to watch them and see what they might contribute to our idea of paranational filmmaking. His short comedy Les Ajoncs from 1970 is nice. An immigrant trying to sell gorse gets into a conflict with a French policeman, but a group of women, workers leaving the factory, come to his rescue.

See you back in Zurich, all best,

Volker.