We Are All Murderers (Nous sommes tous des assassins)

The French-Italian film Nous sommes tous des assassins, known internationally as We Are All Murderers (Siamo tutti assassini in Italian), dates from 1952. Sources call it a crime drama, a courtroom film and a legal drama. It is in French and runs 110 minutes. Director André Cayatte was known for work on legal subjects, and here he builds a cinematic indictment that argues for abolishing the death penalty in France. The film competed at the 1952 Cannes Film Festival, the fifth edition, and took the Special Jury Prize.

At the centre is René, a young man from the slums whom the French Resistance trained during the Second World War to fight the Germans. When the war ends he does not stop killing, because it is all he knows. The story gathers around his trial and the death sentence he faces. Marcel Mouloudji, Raymond Pellegrin and Claude Laydu star, and Antoine Balpêtré, André Valmy, Alexandre Rignault, Anouk Ferjac and André Reybaz are also named in the cast.

Cayatte wrote the screenplay with Charles Spaak. Shooting took place at the Boulogne Studios in Paris, and the sets were designed by art director Jacques Colombier.