Even if She Had Been a Criminal...

The name of the French director Jean Gabriel Pierot is known to us in the Czech Republic thanks to his short film Dies Irae, which was shown at the Datatransfer 2006 festival. Following a single theme, he linked footage of streets, corridors, tunnels and other possible "paths". Without using any commentary, he created a video essay focused on an unanswerable question: "Where are we going?" He uses the same working method in Even If She Had Been A Criminal, but this time he focuses on a specific theme, namely the dark side of the celebrations at the end of the Second World War. While La Marseillaise rings out, we watch the parades of the glorified liberators, but we also see the cruelty and vindictiveness that manifested itself in places with the forcible expulsion of Germans and the public shaving of the hair of women who had fraternised with the enemy. Shaving hair was a denigrating punishment and it resulted in degrading ostracisation. This forgotten theme, which was explored by Alain Resnais in Hiroshima Mon Amour, is revisited by Jean Gabriel Pierot in this short but powerful film compiled from genuine archive material.