52′, directed by Jean-Pierre Carlon.
Co-produced by France Télévisions, with the participation of ERT.
With the support of the CNC, the PROCIREP, the ANGOA, the Conseil Général des Bouches-du-Rhône.
Selected at Figra 2007.
Selection at FIPATEL 2008. Selected at the Amiens International Film Festival 2008.
Other broadcasts: RTS, Histoire.
The Liberation of France is a complex period in our history which, through the purge, continues to feed a real malaise. Twenty thousand women of all ages were shorn in public. Only half of them were punished for “horizontal collaboration”.
For most of them, it was almost always the same story, that of an occupied France in which young girls, out of carelessness or unconsciousness, crossed the forbidden and committed the unthinkable: the crime of adultery with the enemy of the Nation. The punishment of the woman’s body becomes a symbolic and strategic issue. By meeting women who were shorn in 1944, the film and the bonus features shed new light on this gendered punishment, in light of the upheavals that were taking place in French society, particularly with the introduction of the right to vote granted to women on April 21, 1944.
DVD edition by France Télévisions Distribution.