L'Ennemi intime(2002)

“Torture brings up universal moral and ethical questions”

Overview

This film on torture in Algeria retraces, in its complexity, the history of torture during this war. It responds to simple questions even if the answers are complex : when, how, why and how many ? Using interviews from soldiers, confessions from the drafted contingent who practiced electric shock treatment in cold blood, stories from doubtful parachutists, interviews from Algerian victims, heads of the FLN (on the exactions they committed), politicians of the period, historians, this film scrupulously brings to its viewers all the historical, political, social and cultural data that permitted this abomination to develop. Far from just isolating these brut testimonies, these repeated horror stories (either subjected to or from those who carried them out), this film helps us understand how these practices from a different era have been institutionalised in the French Republic (Algeria was French).