National French Contest Uses Testimony from Visual History Archive

View the exhibit here

Secondary school students across France are hard at work on their entries for the 2013-2014 National Contest on Resistance and Deportation – and many of them are drawing inspiration from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.

The National Contest on Resistance and Deportation (CNRD) began in 1961 as a way for French students to create written and audiovisual works inspired by themes of resistance and deportation during World War II. High school students may submit individual essays written as class assignments, group papers, or individual or group audiovisual projects that address the year’s theme. This year’s theme is “The liberation of the territory and return to the republic.”

Winners are selected from each county; from these, national winners are chosen by a jury. For the 2012-2013 contest, 40,553 students from 1,939 schools entered. Seventy entries were audiovisual projects.

For the past two years, USC Shoah Foundation has produced an online exhibit of French testimony clips for CNRD. Students may watch the clips and use them for inspiration, research, or assets in their projects. The clips are taken from French-language testimonies of Holocaust survivors, resistance fighters and witnesses. Each clip is accompanied by biographical information about the interviewee.

The Visual History Archive contains 52,000 audiovisual testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides. The testimonies were conducted in 57 countries in 33 languages.