Richard Dindo: “He was the filmmaker of memory”, by Nicolas Philibert

A great filmmaker has just passed away. In the field of documentary cinema, Richard Dindo was and will remain a leading reference, the man of a rebellious, non-aligned work.

What impressed people first was his determination, his stubbornness. From the day he decided to learn French, settle in Paris and become a filmmaker, he, the grandson of an Italian immigrant born in Zurich who had dropped out of school at the age of 15, nothing and no one would stand in his way! A commission refused him help? Well, he would manage without it, he would shoot the film anyway! He always had two, three, four, five film projects in mind, which he set himself the goal of making, in a precise order, as if there was a logic and a necessity there. He would sign thirty-five of them.

Also read

Quite quickly, he would forge what he called his "system". He could have said his "approach", his "style", but no, he said "system" to describe the rigour that characterised this very personal way of bringing men of the past back to life and reviving them through their own words, by giving them back an image, a dignity, putting his footsteps in theirs, making his words ricochet with theirs. A way of placing men back in history, of rehabilitating those of whom the textbooks never speak, like those Swiss engaged alongside the Spanish Republicans to whom he devoted one of his first films ( Des suisses dans la guerr