Subjects don’t come much more slippery than Jacques Vergès, the half-French, half-Vietnamese lawyer who first came to attention working for the FLN in Algeria’s war of independence and later defended such controversial figures as Klaus Barbie and Slobodan Milosevic. It’s hard to gauge exactly what Schroeder thinks of Vergès, who registers in new interviews as a charming man, driven equally by rabid anti-colonialism, a powerful belief in everyone’s right to a defence and an unshakeable desire for celebrity and success.

F for Fake (French: Vérités et Mensonges) is the last major film completed by Orson Welles. Initially released in 1974, it focuses on Elmyr de Hory's recounting of his career as a professional art forger; de Hory's story serves as the backdrop for a fast-paced, meandering investigation of the natures of authorship and authenticity, as well as the basis of the value of art.

Communist, anticolonialist, right-wing extremist? What convictions guide the moral mind of Jacques Vergès?

This collaborative film, banned for more than a decade by French censors as an attack on French colonialism (and now available only in shortened form), is a deeply felt study of African art and the decline it underwent as a result of its contact with Western civilization. Marker’s characteristically witty and thoughtful commentary is combined with images of a stark formal beauty in this passionate outcry against the fate of an art that was once integral to communal life but became debased as it fell victim to the demands of another culture.

The film begins coolly, neutrally, with aerial views of Nice and the Riviera, picture postcard shots of the opulent hotels and casinos, promenaders, bathers. Satirical juxtapositions begin to creep in: wealthy-looking oldsters/diseased-looking slum kids, swimmers/alligators. In the final movement the editing becomes supercharged and associational: frenetic dancing, cemeteries, grotesque masks, even more frenetic dancing, consuming flames - apocalypse now for all bourgeois parasites!