“Workers have always put up more of a fight. But the bourgeoisie were scared. They had plenty more to lose.”, professes an old man in ”The Sorrow and the Pity,” Marcel Ophüls’ documentary about France’s collaborationist past during World War II. Composed of present-day interviews and archive footage from newsreels and propaganda movies, and originally made for television in 1969, Ophüls’ film was banned by Gaullist censors, who feared it would shatter the myth of France’s patriotic resistance against the Nazis. The country’s portrayal under Nazi occupation is often times comical and terrifying. The old collaborationists struggle to justify their past choices with nervous gestures and flimsy explanations, while the ex-members of the French Resistance have learned, in time, to bury their anger towards the collaborationists. “The Sorrow and the Pity” is a complex and striking image of a subdued country, still in denial over its own choices twenty years after the war had ended. (Raluca Durbacă)