Italian director Silvestro Montanario in an evening in Paris in November 2013 spoke to crowd of 5,000 people via Skype on the harassment he endured at his work place, Italian state television, RAI, due to the film he shot La Francia in Nero (Black France), which was having a huge success on U-tube and which told a very different account from what was being reported in the corporate media on Côte d'Ivoire.
Montanaro was called to attend a meeting by the Ivorian ambassador in Rome and asked who was behind the film. Montanaro testified via his film La Francia in Nero on the complicity of French forces, as well as French diplomatic representatives in the violent coup which overthrew President Laurent Gbagbo. The French illegal complicity on the part of France has since been corroborated by an eight year trial on-going at the International Criminal Court.
Montanaro has since lost his job with Italian state television and can no longer provide the Italian public with his insightful work as he refused to deny the film he had made. He also told us that evening in Paris via skype that while shooting the documentary film in 2012 in Côte d'Ivoire he breathed “ an atmosphere of fear , many people (also western testimonies on the ground, such as missionaries) told him they were too afraid to speak up on camera for fear of being assassinated by President Alassane Ouattara’s newly installed regime.
Watch La Francia in Nero with French subtitles
Some extracts of the evening with Montanaro in Paris below.
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