Ranks of men in uniform are bombarded with Molotov cocktails, makeshift mortars, and small arms fire. Commando units prepare to infiltrate a smoke-covered urban fortress. A city burns under the watchful eye of the press, reporting on “a civil war”.
This isn’t the siege of Aleppo, it’s a scene from Romain Gavras’s Athena, set in one of France’s burning banlieues. Amid the smoke grenades, police and Athenians engage in brutal fighting at close quarters, with metal rods and batons. Later, the police use fire ladders to scale the walls of a tower block. Athenians on wheels circle around a beleaguered police testudo, firing makeshift mortars at point blank range. Men on both sides are visibly shell-shocked.
Athena, a fictitious banlieue, has taken up arms following the death of 13-year-old Idir, apparently at the hands of local police officers. A viral video seemed to confirm it. But rather than being just another anti-cop movie protesting police brutality, Athena never makes it clear whether the police did actually kill Idir. The audience is denied a clear, anti-racist, political message. We are left to choose our own villains.
While the police lay siege to Athena, Idir’s three brothers select very different paths. Karim, the youngest, becomes Athena’s general and messiah, railing against police brutality, masterminding the looting of a nearby police precinct, and manning the defences of Athena. Mokthar, the eldest, is just trying to save his drug empire amid the chaos. The middle brother, Abdel, is a decorated veteran who fought with the French army in Mali, and wants justice for Idir but without bloodshed. The movie is driven by this central tension: between the vengeful idealist, the violent cynic and the honour-bound poster child for French assimilation.
Athena is a dramatisation, shot in Évry-Courcouronnes, just south of Paris — but it could be a documentary set in any of France’s toughest neighbourhoods. Over the past few years, the police have been expelled from these areas (only to come back in massive numbers, for short periods of time, and preferably never at night). Évry-Courcouronnes itself has been rocked by a series of gang-related murders and unspeakably violent clashes. Across France, newspapers overflow with stories of ambulances, firetrucks and police cars being bombarded with fridges, pétanque balls or Molotov cocktails in similar neighbourhoods. The authorities are powerless, just as they are in Athena. As one Athenian boasts while looting the police precinct: “we are the police”.
The banlieues are ruled by drug cartels, which thrive where economic opportunity is lacking. They generate an estimated €4.2 billion annually in France (the publishing industry, for comparison, generates €3.75 billion) and employs a total of around 21,000 full-time workers. Over the last four decades, successive French governments have poured tens of billions of euros into extraordinary plans banlieues and other “Marshall Plans” to renovate these neighbourhoods and attract businesses, but these territories remain deeply segregated and unattractive. Drug-dealing remains one of the few steady jobs.
Take Kassim from a Marseilles banlieue, interviewed for the BFMTV documentary “Marseilles, the drug war”: he describes his stable, well-paying job as a chouf (who keeps an eye for the police or rival gangs, from the Arabic “to watch”). He is adamant that he is not a gangster, and is proud of the long hours he puts in: “I work just like everyone.”
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