Paris banlieue, a police station. In front a crowd of suburban kids and a few adults. Her anger is at the boiling point, there is hardly any time left for connections. A video is circulating that a teenager has apparently died at the hands of the police, once again. His older brother calls for the perpetrators to be punished and urges the crowd to be calm. But at that moment a Molotov cocktail explodes. The spark is lit, the assault begins. And with it the scenario of a coming civil war in France, the likes of which have never been seen more drastically in the cinema.
If in the movie “Athena” from Romain Gavras, who shook up the Venice Film Festival at the weekend, once again burns the proverbial fuse, this time on the last millimeters. After that, what has so often been portrayed as a nightmare becomes reality – the suburbs are exploding all over the country, a hopeless youth is taking up arms, the government is fighting back with increasing severity by the hour, and ultra-right militias are also involved.
But you can only see that in between on the news screens. “Athena” is a film with a classically fixed location, with relentlessly passing time, with an inevitable escalation into the tragic. The journey of the young warriors, filmed seamlessly in one take, takes a quarter of an hour, from the destroyed police station to their fictional high-rise settlement Athena, where they rule and where they will now entrench themselves in their brutalistic concrete castle, against the onslaught of the police, with fireworks and signal ammunition and some real guns too.
The family constellation is also a classic: each brother of the murdered person embodies a suburban strategy
Above all, however, the call for justice, after the murderers in the video have been extradited, resonates more urgently and desperately with each passing minute. The family constellation is also a classic: each brother of the murdered person embodies a suburban strategy. One is the leader of the insurrection, one is a drug dealer fighting only for his business, and the third, a soldier in the French army, used as a mediator, called a traitor, with the same insatiable anger inside him as everyone else, will be torn to pieces.
The call for justice, always a strong driving force in film history, also drives three other works from the festival’s competition, just like their protagonists. Nan Goldin For example, a once-a-photographer of everything from sex, drugs, and wild identity quests to the AIDS epidemic, she demands justice from members of the Sackler family, the billionaire pharmaceutical entrepreneurs at the center of the unscrupulous marketing of opioid painkillers in the US, which also includes Goldin himself in drove the addiction.
You have to listen to even more brutal stories of victims and perpetrators in the documentary “The Kiev Trial” by Sergei Loznitsa
The documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras has been with Goldin from the start in this fight, which also involved making the Sacklers impossible forever as leading art sponsors with their own wings from the Louvre to the Metropolitan Museum. “All The Beauty And The Bloodshed” shows how spectacularly successful it was in four years, how completely the name has now been erased – but also how little the Sacklers were held accountable by the judiciary itself. At one point in the film, three family representatives, forced by the court, have to listen to the bitter stories that opioid victims’ relatives have to tell. The stony, doughy, filthy rich and soulless faces in this zoom call that Poitras captured will not be forgotten in a hurry.
Much more brutal stories of victims and perpetrators have to be found in the documentary “The Kiev Trial” by Sergei Loznitsa listen – but not from the present of the Ukraine war, but from the time of the Nazi occupation in the Third Reich. In cooperation with the Babi Yar memorial, Loznitsa has restored the astonishingly good, previously unseen footage of the war crimes trial at which fifteen German perpetrators from the Wehrmacht to the SS were sentenced to death in 1946 and put it into a form. The perpetrators’ obvious willingness to provide information and their often almost robotic language, which then has to be translated for the judges, is astounding. Above all, they don’t seem to have understood until their closing arguments that the call for justice can only end here on the gallows.
The coming to terms with those crimes that the henchmen of the Argentine military junta committed against political opponents and civilians between 1976 and 1983, at the time of the great disappearance of people, proceeded in a very similar way without any investigation or accountability. Argentine director Santiago Miter made the feature film out of it “Argentina, 1985” made, which like Loznitsa’s documentary gives a voice to the victims and survivors, who finally get the opportunity to tell their horror stories and demand justice.
“Athena” is a highly topical war film of a completely different kind and throws the viewer into the fire with great finesse
But his great and ingenious trick is that he chooses the real prosecutor Julio Strassera (Ricardo Darín) as the protagonist, who doesn’t seem like a heroic figure at all at the beginning. He was doomed to inactivity under the dictatorship and now doesn’t quite trust the new democracy, plus the military is still there and very powerful. So he fears for his life, not without justification, and has to be carried to the hunt – by his children, his wife, the young untainted lawyers he hires to conduct the most important trial in the history of his country. But how this man then grows into his role and finally gets the sentence of life imprisonment for the ex-dictator Videla – that’s one of those unlikely triumphs for which cinema is made.
Finally, back to “Athena” in the Parisian suburbs. Because this highly topical war film of a completely different kind, which throws the audience into the fire with great finesse, is strongly based on the Greek tragedy, there is no hope and no justice inside the story – the country must burn. However, his origins in the film collective Kourtrajmé, which is really a project from the suburbs, gives hope for this. It’s about childhood friends from different backgrounds, from different social backgrounds, who wanted to transform the social explosives of the banlieues into moving images from within, first in the documentation of police violence, then in music videos for Justice and MIA, for example. They are now a real force in French cinema.
When Romain Gavras, the youngest son of the great Greek political filmmaker Costa-Gavras, with his black kindergarten buddy and self-taught filmmaker Ladj Ly (who filmed the gripping history of this subject with “Les Misérables” and wrote the screenplay here) meanwhile a such a powerful thing can bang out, with which banlieue kids become new stars; And if this thing now storms the cinema charts, not only in France, and determines the debate, no longer from the fringes, but from the heart of contemporary art – what will follow from this? If you look back on a time when the big explosion didn’t come after all… this could be one of the reasons why a film like “Athena” could be made.