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The anti-colonialist's wife and fellow film director Soazig Chappedelaine Vautier told the news agency AFP on Sunday that Vautier had died in hospital in his native Brittany region.

During his career, Vautier made more than 150 films, focused initially on the war in Algeria that led to independence in 1962, as well as racism in apartheid-era South Africa, far-right extremism in France, equal opportunities for women, and pollution. Many of his works were banned or condemned.

During World War II and aged only 15, he joined the French Resistance.

Vautier then studied film-making in Paris' Advanced Institute for Cinemagraphic Studies, where various noteables began their careers, including Germany's Volker Schlndorff.

His early film "Afrique 50" began as an educational assignment to show the day-to-day life of West African villagers. Vautier turned it into anti-colonial critique of French rule over the country at the time.

Vautier cited as his motives a "lack of teachers and doctors, the crimes committed by the French Army in the name of France, the instrumentalization of the colonized peoples."

French authorities seized Vautier's film material and, in 1950, he was jailed on various charges - including filming without permission in French colonial Upper Volta, the region that later became Burkina Faso.

Film banned for 40 years

Vautier ended up making the 17-minute "Afrique 50" from a few salvaged film spools. The film remained banned until 1990.

His various works on Algeria's war for independence from France included the 1958 film Algeria in Flames. His later film on Algeria and its war aftermath 20 Years in Aures won the international film critics' award at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival.

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Anti-censorship film-maker Vautier dies