From afar, a terrified young man runs in the dead of night, traversing the backstreets of Paris suburbs, fleeing from ghosts, rushing into the unknown.

A small circle of light looms on the horizon, slicing through the darkness, speeding towards the young man until it reveals itself to be a motorcycle carrying two figures shrouded in darkness.

Spotting a hidden door to a residential building, the young man quickly makes his way in. He asks a passerby to help secure the door shut. But before the task is accomplished, two men in riot gear storm the building, beating the poor lad with thick batons until he breathes his last, despite his pleas and those of the passerby for mercy

Later, France and the world would come to know the name of this martyr well, Malik Oussekine, who would become the icon of the famous French student demonstrations of 1986.

It's a classic scene we've seen often across the globe, and specifically in Paris throughout history. The student uprising against the Vietnam War in 1968. Then the second student crisis against the 1986 university grants law, followed by 2005, and most recently, at the beginning of this current year, 2023, the workers' protests against a bill to change the retirement age proposed by French President Macron.

French director of Algerian origin, Rachid Bouchareb, picked up Malik's story to make it the centerpiece of his significant film Nos Frangins or Our Brothers, which was screened at the end of 2022.

The film sheds light on the tragedy of Malik Oussekine and Abdel Ben Yahia, who died from a stray bullet fired by a drunk policeman in a bar without cause

Fate would have it that both martyrs were of North African origin and neither participated in the demonstrations, yet both paid with their lives simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time

Rachid is a second-generation child of North African immigrants. He was born in Paris to Algerian parents and remained faithful throughout his prolific cinematic career to the issue of the struggles of the North African and African minorities in France.

This time, Rachid based his work on history, specifically the pivotal stormy crisis of 1986 in France's history, which brought down the government and the then Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, and forever changed the structure and approach of the French Ministry of Interior.

From the very start, Rachid relied heavily on an intensive display of archival materials, videos, dialogues, and old photographs about the crisis. The introduction literally transports you back to the mid-eighties, right into the heart of the storm.

Rachid successfully integrated his newly shot cinematic scenes with historical material, blending into a single fabric of a semi-documentary nature, reminiscent of the timeless classic by Oliver Stone, JFK. The recurring question for the viewer becomes: which scenes are newly shot and which are archival footage?

This requires a special skill in controlling the details of the frames, not only in terms of editing, contemporary costumes, and hairstyles, but also in choosing the dominant color grade of the image that is mentally associated in the viewer's subconscious with the archival image of the eighties era.

On the level of the screenplay, the film succeeded in blending the general with the personal. It was a smart dramatic choice not to tell the story from the perspective of its heroes, Malik and Abdel, but from the eyes of those who loved them: their family and friends. The script created a strong motive for uncovering all the human details about the lives of the two icons.

At the beginning, we see them as two unidentified bodies in a morgue when its African-origin worker Othman begins to nobly converse with them as if they were still alive.

He gives them names dear to his heart, then recites a prayer for their souls that seems borrowed from the rituals of a pagan religion embraced by his original tribe, in a subtle reference to the unity of human pain despite the differences in roots, ethnicities, beliefs, and skin color. We are all equal in pain.

We follow the journey of Malik and Abdel's families discovering the details of the tragedy along parallel lines.

Abdel's father, Samir Guesmi, who is summoned by the police to pick up his son Abdel's younger brother after his involvement in a bar fight. The authorities do not inform him of the true fate of Abdel, but they assure him that he is in safe hands being taken care of and will be in touch with him soon

On the other side, Sarah "Lyna Khoudri" and Mohammed "Reda Kateb" are also trying to find their brother Malik, who attended a jazz party at a nightclub with his friends but was never seen again after that.

Gradually, the features of Malik and Abdel's personalities are revealed to us.

Their love stories, dreams, pains, secrets, and which of them wanted to change his religion to blend into the Catholic French society?

In an intentional paradox, we see Sarah in a relationship with a French soldier who is by virtue of his job involved in breaking up protests, thus the fate of their relationship is faced with the dilemma of love at the crossroads of politics.

The acting performance was strong and convincing from all the cast.

Guesmi, Kateb, and Lyna shone in challenging roles of characters facing a heart-wrenching humanitarian catastrophe. Especially Guesmi, who intensified his reactions without exaggeration, especially when he received the ominous news about his son's fate. A fate he had suspected from the start but denied deliberately until the tragedy was confirmed.

The accompanying music included a variety of bold choices from rock classics that embody the spirit of the eighties to Eastern music classics that contradict the nature and place of the event in an intended contrast.

At the end of the film, we sadly watch a real recorded dialogue of Abdel before his martyrdom given to a social program, in which he talks about his openness to other cultures and his desire to know the other!

Then we watch a recorded dialogue of an eyewitness or passerby who tried to defend Malik to no avail

We saw Paris cinematically burn in two films in one year, Athena which we previously talked about, and Our Brothers.

Although both shed light on the spark of racism rooted in French society. But in Athena, we saw the crisis with a sense of Greek epics through a fictional neighborhood and crisis. This time, Rachid approached the crisis from a semi-documentary angle about a real political and humanitarian crisis that happened 37 years ago.

In both cases, we see the capital of light burning on the cinema screen while it actually suffers on the ground.

This is the beauty of art when it gives us multiple horizons and varying angles for the same message, thus broadening the vision and enriching awareness, and maybe we foresee the future