“Dad, where were you in Algeria?” or the silence of veterans

Documentary filmmaker François Aymé thought he knew everything about his beloved father, now deceased: his childhood on a farm in Deux-Sèvres surrounded by ten brothers and sisters, the death of his grandfather who made him head of the family at 14, his meeting at 20 with his future wife, a nurse, at a popular dance, his career as a truck driver... A happy life, almost uneventful, led by a "charismatic" man, a "big mouth, always in a good mood." Three years ago, a family event shook François's certainties: his uncle Auguste decided to write a book to tell what he experienced during his military service in Algeria. Six hundred pages heavy with suffering that had been kept quiet for too long.

Between 1956 and 1962, four boys from the Aymé family were sent across the Mediterranean, officially for an "operation to maintain order and pacification ." A "war without a name," therefore, and without words, since until then none of the brothers had broken the code of silence. Where did Marcel spend his two years in Algeria? What did he see or do? François Aymé decided to undertake some research.

In the military archives, he discovers that, considered a "breadwinner" , Marcel should have been discharged. Lacking manpower in the face of unexpected resistance, the army decided otherwise. Marcel's brothers recount their war: the monotonous daily life of a "hidden man" on an air base in the middle of the desert for Yvon, the horror of front-line combat for Auguste, sent to a commando tasked with hunting down fellaghas. The trauma of having witnessed rape and torture is intact half a century later.

These testimonies are put into perspective by historian Raphaëlle Branche , who has been studying the Algerian War and its denial in French society for over twenty years. With delicacy and simplicity, François Aymé creates the conditions conducive to the liberation of speech and paints a poignant posthumous portrait of his father, whose sunny personality colors the film with a beautiful warmth.