Dawn of the Damned (1965)

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.

• Release Date: 1965-07-05
• Runtime: 1h 25min
• Production Company: Centre National du Cinéma Algérien (CNCA)
• Production Country: Algeria
• Director: Ahmed Rachedi