René Vautier I Le t-shirt essentiel unisexe 100% coton

Material: 100% cotton – STANDARD 100 by OEKO-TEX® certified.

Fit: regular / Fabric weight: 170 g/m²

Jay Ramier, known as Jay One, pays tribute to René Vautier in a drawing whose sense of movement comes from the stripes in the background. Their rhythm runs through the portrait, echoing a cinema that refuses to leave colonial violence out of the frame.

United Souls adds a quotation in which René Vautier describes himself as the most censored French filmmaker. Deliberately crossed out, this sentence makes visible the very thing it denounces: a voice that others try to erase, yet remains legible.

For United Souls, this act of erasure still resonates today. Following the forty-year censorship of Afrique 50, the renaming, in October 2026, of a cinema bearing his name in a town governed by the Rassemblement National serves as a reminder that the struggle over his memory continues.

THE FIGHTING FILMMAKER
RENÉ VAUTIER (1928–2015) – FRANCE

A Breton filmmaker born in 1928 to a working-class father and a schoolteacher mother, René Vautier joined the French Resistance at fifteen and received several decorations for his service. After graduating from the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (IDHEC) in 1948, he travelled to Côte d’Ivoire on a commission from the French League of Education, which wanted to show French schoolchildren “how villagers in French West Africa live”.

Upon arriving in Abidjan, Vautier decided instead to document the crimes of French colonialism and the plundering of resources, camera in hand. The first French anticolonial film, Afrique 50 earned him a prison sentence and was censored in France for more than forty years.

A Communist activist involved in the underground resistance in Algeria, he produced a body of work that included Avoir 20 ans dans les Aurès. A pioneer of politically committed, popular and independent cinema, René Vautier remained a fighting filmmaker until his death in 2015.