Yann Le Masson

Yann Le Masson is a French documentary filmmaker and director of photography, born on June 27, 1930 in Brest (Finistère), died on January 20, 2012 in Avignon (Vaucluse).

Yann Le Masson, born into a traditionalist Catholic family of six children, a Basque mother and a Breton father, grew up in Brest, Vannes, Toulon and then Dakar. After solid studies in mathematics and then electrical engineering, he entered the Ecole de cinéma de la rue de Vaugirard, before IDHEC where he belonged to the cell of filmmakers campaigning against the Indochina War, then for the independence of Morocco and Tunisia and against the war in Algeria. A graduate of IDHEC in 1955, he began working as an assistant operator but, as a convinced anti-colonialist, he worked to extend his deferment of military service until he was twenty-five and considered slipping away to Italy. He received his military summons to join the Pau paratrooper base in the Pyrenees. He then consulted the PC hierarchy up to the Political Bureau, which opposed insubordination considered to be "individualistic".

Despite his police file, the young paratrooper was able to follow the training of the Reserve Officer Cadets of Saint-Maixent (EOR). Leaving as an aspirant, he became a section leader in a shock parachute regiment on the Moroccan border in southern Algeria. In his testimony, he wrote: "I will not dwell on this period which lasted twenty-seven months and during which, as everywhere else, prisoners that the gendarmerie came to pick up by helicopter were dropped into the void, wood work was organized, mechtas or nomads' tents were set on fire. Nor on the role of a section leader... who found himself trapped... Sometimes it was necessary to refuse to obey and I was demoted, to become 'second reserve pump'".