Terrorists in Retirement

Dir. Mosco Boucault, 1983, France, 71min, DCP

In 1943, the Paris-based resistance fighters known as the “Manouchian Group”, (named for their leader, the Armenian poet and Communist Mizzak Manouchian), were rounded up and executed. In 1986, Boucault finds and interviews members of resistance cells, who assassinated Nazis, now living subdued lives, primarily as tailors. But laying underneath this history is the long-buried source of the deaths, the betrayal of their comrades who wanted to suppress the identity of the heroes of the resistance, primarily Jews and immigrants, from Poland, Romania, Spain, Italy and Hungary. So damning was this refutation of French national myth that it was banned from television, and first seen in the United States in 2001 (premiering at Film Forum). Narrated by Simone Signoret, the film reveals horrible, sad truths of collaboration. Earlier this year, Mizzak Manouchian was belatedly honored by France, and reinterred, with his wife, at the Panthéon.