LA riots explode onto Toronto screens in ‘Kings’
TORONTO, Canada: Oscarnominated fi lmmaker Deniz Gamze Erguven revisits the 1992 Los Angeles riots in her timely new fi lm “Kings” as racism once again flares in America.
The fi lm, which premiered at the Toronto fi lm festival on Wednesday, stars Halle Berry as Millie, a hardworking single mother trying to keep her children and strays safe during the LA riots, with help from her cranky South Central neighbour Obie ( Daniel Craig).
Erguven said she was inspired to make the fi lm by the more recent 2005 riots in France.
A forceful police response to protests over the death of two teens at an electrical substation ignited the riots, which quickly spread through mostly poor immigrant suburbs of Paris.
Then interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy further infl amed tensions by referring to the rioters as “riff-raff.”
“I had no intention of burning cars, but I could see what ignited their anger,” Erguven said.
Its release comes amid the proliferation of racist demonstrations in the US, notably in Charlottesville, Virginia where a woman was killed after an avowed white supremacist ploughed his car into a group of anti-racism counterprotestors.
Erguven recalled also how she had been refused French citizenship a second time ( before eventually becoming a French national years later), and felt disheartened and angry – not unlike hundreds of thousands of people facing deportation from the US after President Donald Trump rescinded a programme that deferred deportations of immigrants who had arrived illegally as children.
“It’s the impression that the country where you have roots, that you love is rejecting you,” Erguven told AFP.
“It endangers everything that you’ve constructed and it’s a huge heartbreak.”
The fi lm opens on a 15-year- old African American girl, Latasha Harlins, shot in the back of the head by a Korean storekeeper who thought she was trying to steal orange juice, 13 days after the videotaped police beating of Rodney King in 1991.
The store clerk was convicted of manslaughter and received a US$ 500 fi ne, but no jail time. The shooting has been cited as one of the causes of the LA riots.
It goes on follow Millie trying
The extent of the madness and the heartbreak went so far, the rules of the world for five days were upside down. Deniz Gamze Erguven, filmmaker
t t o o keep her kids on the straight and narrow, interspersed with news footage of the King beating and the trial of the four policemen charged in his assault, as well as their eventual acquittal and the fi res that this fanned.
The verdict provoked outrage among African Americans and triggered over six days of riots, during which 63 people were killed and more than 2,000 were injured.
“The extent of the madness and the heartbreak went so far, the rules of the world for five days were upside down,” Erguven said.
Although compelling, the fi lm touches only lightly on police relations with the African American community, while the horror and tragedy of the riots are spliced with moments of levity.
A l s o Obie is one of the few white men living in a part of LA inhabited by mostly African Americans, Latinos and Koreans. But this is overlooked.
Erguven said she takes a colour-blind view that race is a cultural construct and not a biological reality, and explains that much of the story is told through the eyes of children.
“From the perception of the kids and their level of understanding it’s very, very funny (strange) what’s going on,” she said. — AFP