Dawn of the Damned

• Cast: Mouloud Mammeri, Mohamed Chouikh, René Vautier, Ahmed Rachedi, Mazouz Ould-Abderrahmane
• Duration: 85 minutes
• Genre: Documentary, History, Drama
• Rating: 7.2/10
• Release Date: 1965-07-05

This excellent feature-length documentary - the story of the imperialist colonization of Africa - is a film about death. Its most shocking sequences derive from the captured French film archives in Algeria containing - unbelievably - masses of French-shot documentary footage of their tortures, massacres and executions of Algerians. The real death of children, passers-by, resistance fighters, one after the other, becomes unbearable. Rather than be blatant propaganda, the film convinces entirely by its visual evidence, constituting an object lesson for revolutionary cinema.