J’ai huit ans

René Vautier, Olga Baïdar-Poliakoff, Yann Le Masson
1961. France. vo French. 10’

This short film, shot clandestinely during the Algerian war, is based on drawings by Algerian children collected in 1961 in a refugee camp in Tunisia.

Through their drawings, the children express the full horror of the war that forced them and their families to flee their country.
The film was banned by the police and seized 17 times. It was not granted a censorship visa until 1974, twelve years after the end of the Algerian war.

The making of J'ai huit ans is in line with the work of Frantz Fanon (an author and theorist committed to opposing colonialism, and an FLN activist from 1956 onwards), who, at the start of the Algerian war, was head physician at the Blida psychiatric hospital, As a psychiatrist, he devoted a chapter of his book Les damnés de la terre to the psychopathological consequences of war and torture), who went to the refugee camps along the Algerian-Tunisian border in 1961 to collect children's drawings. This collection, begun with René Vautier, would become J'ai huit ans.