In a 1920 report, Marshal Lyautey wrote, "we have no doubt about the positive results that we should expect from the use of cinematography as an instrument of education". The wishes of Lyautey did not however fully materialize until the Second World War and for obvious reasons. French colonial authorities were very concerned about the reaction of their colonial subjects vis-à-vis Nazi propaganda. Since the end of the 1920's, films started to combine both image and sound and became therefore a major instrument of propaganda and counter-propaganda especially during the war. This paper is an attempt to look at the ways in which French authorities used the cinema to "educate" its colonial subjects and to look at the mechanisms of censorship that were applied. The very nature of cinema as a medium of communication meant that this propaganda was not limited to an urban elite alone, but to a wide range of public including the countryside. The use of the cinema as an instrument of propaganda was closely linked with the logic of "la psychologie des masses" as an intellectual basis very much in vogue in France in the Middle of the 20th century. Another concern of this paper is therefore to analyze the relation between film propaganda and the epistemological ground upon which colonial authorities based their rational for propaganda and censorship in colonial North Africa. From this angle I intend to probe the question of the relationship between French metropolitan knowledge and a particular kind of colonial control and practices.