Histoires d’images, images d’Histoire 2014

Directed by Moïra Chappedelaine-Vautier

In 1950, in full reconstruction, the workers of Brest went on strike. It will last more than a month and will be bloody. Edouard Mazé, a 26-year-old worker from Brest, will die during the demonstration on April 17, dozens of his comrades will be injured and one of them, Pierre Cauzien, will be amputated five days later. The city is under siege. René Vautier, a 20-year-old filmmaker, goes clandestinely to Brest, at the call of the CGT, to shoot a film on the reasons for anger. The trace of these events is now tenuous and carried by witnesses whose words are gradually dying out. This film proposes to find the traces of these events, to collect the words of the witnesses, to search their personal archives, to exhume the forgotten photograms, to open the official files hitherto protected, to delve into the depths of individual memories to understand. In 1950, a man died... But who still remembers?