Dawn of the Damned

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.