I SAW BEN BARKA GET KILLED (J’ai vu tuer Ben Barka)

January 1966: In a Paris flat police dis- cover the body of Georges Figon, the man who broke the scandal of the Ben Barka affair and undermined Gaullist power. A year earlier, tired of dodgy deals and petty scams, ex-con Georges Figon had gone in search of something big. Through his underworld connections he had got himself hired as producer for a docu- mentary on decolonialisation to be written by Marguerite Duras and directed by Georges Franju. The well-known Moroccan dissident Mehdi Ben Barka was to be the film’s ‘historical advisor’. But the whole film project was a trap…