Les Pieds noirs, histoires d’une blessure

Description

This documentary is mainly composed of personal testimonies and family archives. The story of the French settlers (Pieds Noirs) is above all that of French Algeria: a tale of conquest, the colony established on foreign soil, by the settlers, a population made up of Spanish republicans, Italians fleeing fascism, the Maltese fleeing poverty, or even working-class Parisian.
It is mainly the descendants of the ordinary people that the war drove out from Algeria in 1962, the major colonists having fled well beforehand. When they returned to the continent, they were considered too different to be French.
They were treated as exploiters, fascists who had refused to give the Algerians their independence. To aggravate this misunderstanding, the repatriated remained silent or let the Far Right speak for them.
44 years later, in thousands of families, the elders feel the need to tell the story of a different past: the diversity of origins, the complexity and richness of the cultural “melting-pot”; each personal story brings to light a new perspective of this collective history.