LOS ANGELES, United States — A French
animation about the deadly police crackdown on protests by Algerians in 1960s
Paris was among the winners on Thursday of the
Student Academy Awards, held for
the first time at Los Angeles’ recently opened film museum.
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The short film is the latest effort to spotlight a
violent event which was covered up for decades by French authorities, before
President
Emmanuel Macron condemned it as “inexcusable” last year.
“We wanted to make this film to put the light on an
event way too unknown in France, even though it is part of our history,” said
Yanis Belaid, Eliott Benard, and Nicolas Mayeur, the filmmakers of The Seine’s
Tears.
“We would be glad that it makes people want to
discover more about it, and to show our way to see the future without
forgetting what happened,” they said, ahead of receiving a bronze prize at the
annual ceremony held by the Oscar-awarding academy on Thursday evening.
Marking the 60th anniversary of the Algerian
protests last October, Macron told relatives of victims that “crimes” were
committed on the command of notorious Paris police chief
Maurice Papon.
He acknowledged that several dozen protesters had
been killed, “their bodies thrown into the River Seine”, and paid tribute to
their memory. The precise number of victims has never been made clear and some
activists fear several hundred could have been killed.
The 1961 protests were called in the final year of
France’s increasingly violent attempt to retain Algeria as a north African
colony, and in the middle of a bombing campaign targeting mainland France by
pro-independence militants.
Specifically, they were called in response to a
strict curfew imposed on Algerians to prevent the underground FLN resistance
movement from collecting funds following a spate of deadly attacks on French
police officers.
The Student Academy Awards are a key program of the
Hollywood film industry’s top body, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences.
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