Le Rendez-vous des quais (Rendez-vous of the Docks) and La Recréation (short film)
Paul Carpita, 1955, 75 min.
In French with English subtitles
Introduced by Shanny Peer [+ video intro from French distributor]
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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.
