The filmmaker Paul Carpita, whose film "Le rendez-vous des quais" on the Indochina War had been censored for thirty-five years, died on Saturday at his home in Marseille at the age of 86.
Born in 1922 in the Phocaean city, son of a docker and a fishmonger, Paul Carpita made in 1955 his first feature film, "Le rendez-vous des quais", a love story of a dockworker and a dockworker, against the backdrop of a dock strike in reaction to the Indochina war.
The film was seized and banned by censorship; it only emerged in 1991 to be hailed as a "forerunner of the New Wave".
"As soon as I knew how to use the camera I got when I was little, I turned it on the side of millions of people who look like Mom and Dad, people humiliated, despised," said the defender of a popular cinema that had joined the Communist Party at a very young age.
In 2002, Paul Carpita signed his third and final feature film, "Marche et rêve", a "southern comedy" with a tender look at three unemployed metalworkers, in the small Provençal town of Martigues.
All his life, Paul Carpita was a humanist full of poetry, an essential filmmaker of the social school, a painter of a world of work that would have been forgotten without him and to which the Minister of Culture and Communication wishes to pay a warm tribute tonight.