While studying filmmaking at France’s Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques, the young Stephen Ujlaki became caught up in the political upheaval that shook France in May 1968. The student revolt began with campus protests but rapidly expanded into strikes and a nationwide confrontation involving students, workers, police, and the government of President Charles de Gaulle. In the aftermath of the uprisings, Ujlaki was arrested and held in Paris’s La Santé Prison, one of the city’s most notorious correctional institutions. The episode ended not with a conventional film-school graduation but with his deportation from France, abruptly severing his association with the Parisian avant-garde scene in which he had also found an informal internship with Jean-Luc Godard. Ujlaki relocated to Stockholm, where he attended rehearsals for Ingmar Bergman’s production of Woyzeck, worked part-time as a dockworker, and directed the documentary Tunnelbana about the Stockholm subway. His arrest and expulsion became an extraordinary early chapter in the career of a filmmaker who would later document prison reform and political conflict in the United States.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1960s
Arrested at La Santé: Stephen Ujlaki’s Deportation From France After the May 1968 Revolt
Stephen Ujlaki / 1960s
While studying filmmaking at France’s Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques, the young Stephen Ujlaki became caught up in the political upheaval that shook France in May 1968. The student revolt began with campus protests but rapidly expanded into strikes and a nationwide confrontation involving students, workers, police, and the government of President Charles de Gaulle. In the aftermath of the uprisings, Ujlaki was arrested and held in Paris’s La Santé Prison, one of the city’s most notorious correctional institutions. The episode ended not with a conventional film-school graduation but with his deportation from France, abruptly severing his association with the Parisian avant-garde scene in which he had also found an informal internship with Jean-Luc Godard. Ujlaki relocated to Stockholm, where he attended rehearsals for Ingmar Bergman’s production of Woyzeck, worked part-time as a dockworker, and directed the documentary Tunnelbana about the Stockholm subway. His arrest and expulsion became an extraordinary early chapter in the career of a filmmaker who would later document prison reform and political conflict in the United States.
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