On the night of December 5, 1986, returning from a jazz concert, Malik Oussekine (Adam Amara), a French Algerian student, was walking through the sixth arrondissement of Paris, where a student demonstration protesting a university reform law was taking place. The forces of order, led by a brigade of motorcycles, took him for a troublemaker as he fled in panic into the hallway of a building. They beat him to death.
That same night, in a Paris suburb, another man, Abdel Benyahia, lost his life after being shot by a drunk police officer.
When an internal affairs police inspector, Daniel Mattel (Raphael Personnaz), was appointed to investigate both cases, the police force and the government colluded to cover up these killings. In the meantime, the families of the victims were attempting desperately to uncover the truth.
Born in Paris to an Algerian family, three-time Oscar-nominated director Rachid Bouchareb, along with Algerian novelist Kaouther Adimi, co-wrote the script of Our Brothers, inspired by the story of Oussekine – a case of police violence believed to have caused the death of the 22-year-old during a student demonstration organized in protest against a university reform bill.
Although the director wanted to stick to reality as much as possible, the film is nonetheless a free interpretation of the actual events. Because the records of these two cases are not public, he had to rely on many hours of TV footage of the night of Ossekine’s death. “The research we did in the public archives led us to delve as deeply as possible into what really happened at the time and in the lives of these young people. Naturally, this is a fiction so my job was to find the balance between reality and fiction,” said Bouchareb in an interview for France 24 at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
“It’s a story I knew very well because I lived near the neighborhood where Abdel’s murder happened. The student protest demonstrations were taking over the streets of Paris in those days. These are two separate murders that happened on the same night and that shocked me. That’s why I made a personal decision to make this film, to remember the memory of these two young men.”
For his latest opus, the director assembled a cast composed of Reda Kateb (The Specials, Promises), Lyna Khoudri (Blessed, Papicha, Haute Couture), Raphaël Personnaz (Persona Non Grata) and Samir Guesmi (who recently made his directorial debut with Ibrahim).
With Our Brothers, Bouchareb continues his exploration of memory flaws after he made an impression in 2006 with the Oscar-nominated war drama Days of Glory devoted to the fate of soldiers recruited in Africa, forgotten by the French army. Then, in 2010, he made Outside the Law about the journey of three brothers against the backdrop of the Algerian war.
Our Brothers is the Algerian entry in the Golden Globes Best Foreign Language Film category.