Nos frangins

I saw this at the Film Festival of Angoulême. The film was also screened in Cannes out of competition. The reputation of the director made me choose this for the first screening I attended at the festival. The film takes place in 1986 and starts with the murder of two young Algerian men by the French police in Paris. I am too young to have heard of this affair, but it was something that shook the whole society and led to big student protests. The terrible thing is that the police tried to cover it up and almost succeeded were it not for witnesses and the determination of one of the families to prosecute the responsible officers.

The problem of the film is that it's out of balance. One of the families is given a lot of screen time, and the other very little. The structure is meant to make the events hit us extra hard, but unfortunately Bouchareb is not able to fulfill his ambitions. The actors are excellent, but they don't have much to do. For instance the police inspector is just wandering around looking serious.

Not a bad film, but I expected more.

Told in a sort of slow burn/slow reveal style that largely takes place over a few days in December 1986 (but occasionally jumps around a bit in time) during two unrelated police killings of young Algerian men (one was shot by a drunk officer, the other brutally beaten by a motorcycle riot-response unit).

The film does a very good job of depicting how police distort "officer-involved" violent incidents and ultimately try to cover them up. From early on, the fix is in as Internal Affairs scrambles to delay announcing one death so soon after another.

The film is quite well-acted and does a very good job of mixing archival footage of actual events & people with the portrayals of those events by the cast. The use of music is particularly well done, with to notable exceptions: the somewhat jarring montages set to punk rock that seem to celebrate & revel in the violence of the protests, making the film seem a little less "balanced" than one might hope. (Whatever one thinks of protests or police brutality, surely throwing Molotov cocktails onto balconies of buildings in residential areas is not worthy of jubilation.)

The ultimate outcome of the investigations is explained in text via epilogue, but should come as no surprise to anyone who follows police brutality cases.