In that wild 11-minute opening, Gavras and co-writers Elias Belkeddar and Ladj Ly establish the police murder of 13-year-old Idir (Mohamed Amri) and introduce two of the three brothers who will butt heads over how to react to Idir’s death. The two complement each other, and the conversation they create about the long-lasting impact of colonial structures and the ensuing morass of nationality versus ethnicity is as illuminating as it is rare.Īthena dives into these considerations from the very beginning. If The Battle of Algiers’s “France is your motherland … Work with us” line could easily be heard in Athena, then Athena’s “It’s about proving to them it’s no good anymore, assuming we’re the victims” could be from The Battle of Algiers. But Athena is full of elements that evoke the older film, from arguments about violence’s effectiveness as political strategy to the humanization of Algerian and Muslim men and women too often targeted by French government policies. ![]() Athena isn’t exactly a modern-day The Battle of Algiers - Gavras leans a little too agit-pop for that, while Pontecorvo’s depiction of the Algerian rebellion against French colonizers skewed closer to documentary. And while this scene could easily be from Romain Gavras’s Netflix film Athena, which follows an uprising in a French housing project, it’s actually a key moment in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 classic The Battle of Algiers. But the paratroopers and patrolmen are unbothered by the bigotry they have signed up to defend: “France is your motherland … Work with us,” they order the victims of this discrimination, and the fact that they expect obedience speaks to the smug indoctrination of power.Īll of this - the barbed wire, the weapons, the condescending attempt at comfort - fuels the state of oppression and fear in which these “unpeople,” per British historian Mark Curtis’s definition (“those whose lives are deemed worthless, expendable in the pursuit of power and commercial gain”) have lived for decades. ![]() These people’s movements are curtailed by checkpoints built around their homes, and their language (Arabic) and religion (Islam) are discouraged, too. ![]() The French police and military point their guns at men, women, and children alike in a run-down urban neighborhood that is physically close to but economically distant from a number of wealthier communities. Spoilers follow for the Romain Gavras film Athena and the 1966 film The Battle of Algiers.
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