Film starring Jane Fonda about 1968 Paris student protests, Tout va bien, with Jean-Luc Godard as co-director, gives voice to France's working class

Jane Fonda, Yves Montand  Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin

In May 1968, students at the Sorbonne University in France staged a demonstration against the government's reforms to the education system. The protest was anti-capitalist and quickly spread all over the country, with students coming into violent conflict with a vicious police force.

When the French trade unions went on strike in support of the students, it seemed a coalition of students and workers might just overthrow the state.

The situation was defused when then prime minister Georges Pompidou offered the trade unions pay rises. But the events of 1968 caused a huge change in the mass consciousness of the French: everyone was affected.

French auteur Jean-Luc Godard's Tout va bien does not directly document the 1968 uprising - it's set during a fictional strike in a sausage-making factory in 1972. But his aim was to analyse how the protests had changed the world view of the French, and also depicted the political forces at play in the conflict.

Godard made Tout va bien as a mouthpiece for the working classes, who he felt were represented in a facile way by the media during the crisis. The director had participated in the demonstrations himself and intended the film as an attack on the capitalist system.