Terror's Advocate

Jacques Vergès was a French lawyer. During the Algerian war he defended Djamila Bouhired of the independence movement, and afterwards married her. The cases he took on from then made a line of their own: the Red Army Faction, Palestinian organisations, Carlos, Khieu Samphan of the Khmer Rouge, and Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief in Lyon. The documentary opens these files one by one and sits Vergès down opposite them. He makes his own defence: everyone has a right to be defended, and the courtroom is where politics continues. Barbet Schroeder directs; two hours and fifteen minutes, with Carlos, Magdalena Kopp and former Algerian militants speaking alongside Vergès. The film neither clears him nor convicts him; what it asks is where, between defending the colonised and defending a man who carried out genocide, he changed places. Vergès never answers that.