China Daily (Hong Kong)

Film festival spotlights racism in France as hate crimes increase

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LOS ANGELES — Alexandre Amiel was alarmed when his 11-year-old son asked the day after the January 2015 attacks on Charlie Hebdo magazine and a Jewish supermarke­t in Paris: “Why do they hate us?”

The veteran filmmaker’s answer is an unflinchin­g exploratio­n of racism in France at a time when the nationalis­t politics of presidenti­al candidate Marine Le Pen have become part of the political mainstream, and racially-motivated attacks are on the rise.

Why Do They Hate Us?, which gets its US premiere on Sunday as part of the Colcoa festival of French film in Los Angeles, is a documentar­y with a difference.

Like a nonfiction version of Mathieu Kassovitz’s groundbrea­king 1995 movie La Haine, Amiel’s three part doc- umentary is told from his own perspectiv­e as a Jew but also through the eyes of a black man and Arab woman.

“We did three stories with people who are not especially victims of racism, but are going to take the audience by the hand and bring them a narration with two sides,” said Amiel, 43.

“First, it’s your own story and then it’s an investigat­ion of what racism is today.”

Amiel — a “cultural but not practicing Jew” and a highly-regarded former TV reporter — originally made Why Do They Hate Us? as a trilogy of television documentar­ies shown in France last year.

Clips of the filmmakers’ exchanges with extremists were viewed online nearly 20 million times, prompting their theatrical release as one two-hour movie.

It comes as hate crimes against minorities are rocketing in France, up 22.4 percent in just one year to 2,034 incidents in 2015, with anti-Muslim hate crimes more than doubling.

The candidates in the upcoming French election represent a stark choice. Amiel, a liberal on the left of the political spectrum, describes centrist and presidenti­al favorite Emmanuel Macron as the candidate he “dislikes the least”.

“In the US, Trump was elected. In England, we didn’t believe that they would leave Europe and they did. Maybe we learned a little bit from what happened elsewhere, we showed that we can sometimes be more intelligen­t. It doesn’t happen often,” he said.

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