Rendez-vous des quais
Paul Carpita, 1955, 75 min
In French with English subtitles

Banned in France for nearly thirty years, Paul Carpita’s Rendez-vous des quais (1955) stands as a vital work of political cinema and chronicle of working-class life in postwar Marseille.

Carpita, a former schoolteacher with a deep commitment to social justice, set the film against the backdrop of the early 1950s dockworkers’ strikes, when the workers—discovering they were unwittingly loading weapons by day and unloading coffins by night—refuse to be complicit in France’s war in Vietnam. The film was censored for its anti-colonial message and open solidarity with the labor movement and only rediscovered decades later

The film series presents films that were censored upon their release in France, Lebanon, or the United States – and often banned in other countries as well. Produced between 1943 and 1985, these films were suppressed by state authorities who considered them searing indictments of the prevailing social and political order. The full festival program can be found here.