Le Comité Maurice Audin

With my wife, Olga Poliakoff, we made "I'm Eight Years Old" based on an idea by René Vautier. Using drawings by Algerian children who were refugees in Tunisia, the film immerses the viewer in the traumatized world of these children, horrifically linking the word "France" with words like "kill," "burn," and "torture." The live-action footage was shot in Tunisia by René Vautier and myself. A second set of drawings was compiled, and the children's testimonies were recorded by Olga at the Algerian-Tunisian border. The entire film was edited in collaboration with Jacqueline Meppiel. The first screening took place in Paris on February 10, 1962, without any precautions or authorization, for about fifty people. Sponsored by the Maurice Audin Committee, the film then circulated clandestinely throughout France in dozens of copies and was seen by tens of thousands of people while the OAS was carrying out bombings in Paris and Algiers – Yann Le Masson

On October 17, 1961, 30,000 Algerians demonstrated peacefully in Paris to protest the discriminatory curfew imposed upon them and to demand Algerian independence. Under the authority of the then Prefect of Police, Maurice Papon, the demonstration was brutally repressed, resulting in the deaths of dozens of Algerians. Historians cite eleven thousand arrests, dozens of murders, demonstrators thrown into the Seine, hundreds of expulsions, and just as many complaints that went unanswered; all for a night that would become a blind spot in the national narrative. No investigation, no trial, and certainly no commemoration. The 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 Paris. The film was banned by the French authorities. It obtained a distribution license in 1973. It was first shown in theaters in October 2011.