I believe that many people remember the cult film “La haine” (The Hate) by Matthieu Kassovitz from 1995 about the lives of three young migrants in the suburbs of Paris. In part, Kassovitz designed the story for his still most famous film based on the real events of ten years earlier and the tragedy that led to boiling and anger, and we see the later protests in the opening documentary footage. The brutal murder of the 22-year-old student of Algerian origin, Malik Oussekine, has now received its own series. That murder happened on December 6, 1986, when the police beat a young man to death on the street who happened to be in the part of Paris where student protests were going on. The unfortunate 22-year-old literally found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and his murder led to large protests and a change in the consciousness of a good part of the citizens about the issue of the police and their role.
The four-part mini-series created by Antoine Chevrollier and Cedric Ido in an almost documentary style primarily follows the events after the murder of Oussekin and the drama that his family then experienced. However, at the same time, “Ousekine” is also a series that captures the social and political circumstances in France in the second half of the 1980s in an exceptional way, and how human tragedy was tried and succeeded in politicizing it to achieve political goals. Occasionally, in flashbacks, we also follow the family story of this family that immigrated to France in the fifties. Malik’s father fought for France in World War II, and later settled there with his wife, and they had seven children there who considered themselves more French than Algerian.
Malik was the youngest child, and a few years before he was born, his family survived the Paris massacre of French Algerians who were killed by the police in the street and their bodies dumped in the Seine. This mini-series brilliantly shows how this family, especially the parents, felt like second-class citizens in France and that sometimes hidden, and often unhidden, racism towards immigrants from the former French colonies. It is a series of police brutality, but also later attempts to place the blame on the victim, exculpate the policemen who brutally beat the young man, and to cover up the whole case if possible. However, it is primarily a series about a family tragedy, and “Ousekine” begins shockingly and poignantly from the very beginning, when Malik’s family realizes that something bad has happened.
Malik is nowhere to be found, no one knows what happened to him, but his brothers and sisters sense that something is wrong. They try to hide from their mother (Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass, who we still remember best from the masterpiece “Incendies”) that something is wrong, and when the police finally tell them that Malik was killed, they try to make him the culprit. The police will try to pin him down that he was a Lebanese terrorist even though the boy is originally from Algeria, and there will be pressure, open threats to the family and various incitements to keep him from making waves. In order to get a full perspective on the event that had an exceptional impact on French society, each episode has a somewhat different theme. In the first one, the focus is on the murder and the shock that Malik’s family experienced afterwards, the second one focuses mostly on the police and the Parisian authorities, led by the later president Jacques Chirac, who are trying to cover up the case. The third episode deals with the Oussekine family, and in the fourth, the court case against the policemen who killed the young man is in the foreground.
Although more than 35 years have passed since the murder of Malik Oussekine, this whole tragedy is still extremely relevant because the topic of police brutality, corruption and corruption is completely universal. “Ousekine” brilliantly shows not only the historical circumstances, but also puts the whole story in context and raises the somewhat philosophical and apparently eternal question of immigration, but also of the adaptation of immigrants and their acceptance by the domicile population. Nevertheless, the key question raised by this mini-series is whether this would have happened at all if Oussekine had been a white man, an autochthonous Frenchman, and in a somewhat Rasomon style, we get an insight into the whole story from various perspectives and realize that the situation here is extremely complex and not at all simple and unequivocal. .