Even if She Had Been a Criminal... / Eut-elle été criminelle...

Jean-Gabriel Périot / France / 2005 / 9 min.

While La Marseillaise rings out, we watch the parades of the glorified liberators, but we also see the cruelty and vindictiveness that manifested itself in places with the forcible expulsion of Germans and the public shaving of the hair of women who had fraternised with the enemy. Shaving hair was a denigrating punishment and it resulted in degrading ostracisation. This forgotten theme, which was explored by Alain Resnais in Hiroshima Mon Amour, is revisited by Jean Gabriel Périot in this short but powerful film compiled from genuine archive material. The name of the French director Jean Gabriel Périot is known to us in the Czech Republic thanks to his short film Dies Irae, which was shown at the Datatransfer 2006 festival. Following a single theme, he linked footage of streets, corridors, tunnels and other possible "paths". Without using any commentary, he created a video essay focused on an unanswerable question: "Where are we going?" He uses the same working method in Even If She Had Been a Criminal, but this time he focuses on a specific theme, namely the dark side of the celebrations at the end of the Second World War.



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Production Company
Yves Le Yaouanq Envie de Tempete Productions
ENVIE DE TEMPETE PRODUCTIONS
57bis, rue de Tocqueville
Paris
75017 France
tel: +33 149 983 994
fax: +33 149 469 209
enviedetempete@wanadoo.fr
www.enviedetempete.com