France
Shown in 1971
CREDITS
- dir
-
Annie Tresgot
- cam
-
Jean-Yves Coic
- editor
-
Nadine Fischer
- cast
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Mohammed Choikh (narration)
- prod co
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Centre algerian de documentation et d’information
- source
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Centre Algerian De Documentation et d’Information
-
COMMENTS
Shown as part of the New Directors series, with Annie Tresgot in person.
OTHER
One of the new directors honored during the Critics Week in the recent Cannes Film Festival was the young Frenchwoman, Annie Tresgot. Her first feature, Les Passagers describes, in cinema-verité style, the two years’ experience of a young Algerian who emigrates to France to find work. Miss Tresgot received her cinematographic training at IDHEC, the French film institute and, after an apprenticeship as script girl to Billy Wilder, assistant editor to Resnais, Jean Rouch and Denys Colomb de Daunat, she directed a number of short films. In 1967, she co-directed Les Enfants de Neant with the French Canadian, Michel Brault, a film that was also chosen for the Cannes Critics’ Week that year. It was her association with Rouch and Brault, in particular, that inspired her to make direct-contact films. In 1969, Miss Resgot was commissioned to make a film for the Algerian government, Visages de l’Emigration, one which would show to potential emigrants that everything in France was not as rosy as the applicants might think and, as a result, there might be some limitations upon the requests. The candidates for emigration were not only subjected to sanitation controls, but even if one were considered a qualified technician, the interests of the government determined all approvals. At any rate, the film she made did not appeal to the tastes of the director, and since an entire story about one individual had been filmed and not used (over 24 hours of rushes), Annie Tresgot managed to convince the Algerians to let her make a second film. This became Les Passagers. The central figure is Rachid, a representative type of young Algerian emigrant in terms of social origin, his attachment to his culture and the shock of confronting a foreign one. Rachid’s humor is perfectly understood by Algerians, and if Europeans understood it, too, then innumerable conflicts could be avoided. Miss Tresgot wanted to reveal all the problems, starting from the beginning—the spectator becomes Rachid and the result is an altogether truthful, ironic, emotionally moving lesson in humanism. Les Passagers is among the great film documents of all time, and Annie Tresgot has been acclaimed as one of France’s most promising new cinema directors by all who have benefited from the insights presented with such honesty and personal commitment.
—Albert Johnson
FACTOID #232
Our first seminar at the Festival was entitled Censorship and the Actor’s Art: A Symposium, featuring panelists Michael Mayer and Lou Greenspan at Grace Cathedral, October 24, 1966.
