Jacques Panijel, 1962, 70 min. French with English subtitles
Screening followed by a discussion with Madeleine Dobie, Nicole Wallenbroek and Jihad Azahrai
On the night of October 17, 1961, Parisian police brutally repressed a peaceful demonstration of Algerians protesting France’s colonial war in Algeria. Dozens were killed while the French state imposed a strict silence on the massacre. Octobre à Paris, directed by Jacques Panijel, was one of the first attempts to break that silence, weaving together first hand testimonies, archival documents, and reconstructed scenes to bear witness to a tragedy the authorities sought to erase.
Completed in 1962, Octobre à Paris was immediately banned by French censors, and it would take over a decade for the ban to be lifted. Today, Panijel’s film stands as a landmark of militant cinema and a courageous act of historical memory.
Watch the trailer here
Madeleine Dobie is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Columbia. Her areas of expertise include Francophone/postcolonial literature, colonial history, and 18th-century culture, and she has a particular interest in Algerian history and culture. She is currently working on a book about testimony given long after a violent or traumatic event, including belated accounts of the Algerian Revolution written by combatants and militants. A second current book project is about literature, cinema and other forms of artistic expression in contemporary Algeria.
Nicole Beth Wallenbrock is Assistant professor at Hostos Community College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her books include The Franco-Algerian War through a 21st Century Lens (Bloomsbury, 2020) and the co-edited volume Migrants' Perspective, Migrants in Perspective (Edinburgh University Press, 2021).
Jihad Azahrai is a PhD student in the French Department at Columbia University whose research focus is the Maghreb and Maghrebi diaspora, memory and gender studies and multilingualism.
This screening is part of Columbia Maison Française CENSORED FILM SERIES - FALL 2025.
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