Top 10 Movies That Explain the French Riots

In Jean Vigo’s medium-length silent masterpiece, a group of junior high school students at a stuffy old boarding school decide to revolt against their headmasters, bringing anarchy to a cruel and hypocritical institution. At once lyrical, raucous and surreal — including what’s arguably the most mesmerizing pillow fight ever captured on screen — Zero for Conduct was a major influence on both François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (some scenes are nearly identical) and Lindsay Anderson’s If…, which features a similar plot. Censored in 1933 for being “anti-French” and only released in theaters a decade after Vigo’s death, it remains a landmark movie of youth in revolt.

The great Jean Renoir (son of the famous painter) followed his masterful WWI drama La Grande Illusion with this sprawling, garrulous period piece made with the support of the leftist Front Populaire government. “A film for the people and by the people” is how the director pitched a project that sympathetically portrays both the fading monarch Louis XVI (played by Renoir’s brother, Pierre) and the band of impoverished citizens who marched from the south to Paris, overthrowing the king and establishing the First Republic in 1792. (France is currently on its Fifth Republic.) Joyful and generous, La Marseillaise nonetheless ends in a bloodbath that echoes the chorus of its titular national anthem: “Let us march! Let us march! May impure blood water our fields!”

Banned from French theaters for nearly 50 years, Jacques Panijel’s historically vital exposé bravely denounced a massacre that was perpetrated by the government and then swept under the rug for several decades. On the night of October 17th, 1961, thousands of Algerian men, women and children peacefully marched into Paris against a curfew imposed on them after a series of attacks by Algerian nationalist party FLN (National Liberation Front) were carried out on French soil. The marchers were met with a bloody repression at the hands of the Paris police and its prefect Maurice Papon (who was also responsible for deporting Jews under the Vichy regime), resulting in hundreds of deaths, many of them caused by drowning in the Seine. Stark and essential, Panijel’s film remains one of the few records of a catastrophe that France only officially recognized in 2001.

Before Jean-Luc Godard started making overtly political movies in 1967 (La Chinoise, Far From Vietnam), he directed this beautiful, blistering portrait of a wayward 21-year-old (New Wave stalwart Jean-Pierre Léaud) looking for love and meaning in a Paris racked by social tension, random violence and rampant consumerism imported from the U.S. “The children of Marx and Coca-Cola” is how a title card describes protagonist Paul and the women in his life, including his on-and-off paramour, Madeleine (played by chanteuse Chantal Goya, whose yé-yé pop songs pepper the soundtrack). With the Vietnam War looming in the background and de Gaulle still in power, Masculin féminin shows French youth on the brink of a political situation that would soon erupt.

In this scathing antiracist art film, an African man from the former colonies arrives in Paris to start a new life, only to face bigotry and condescension at the hands of white people claiming “liberté, égalité, fraternité” but rarely practicing it when it comes to other races. It was inspired by the experiences of its director, Med Hondo (real name Mohamed Abid), who emigrated from Mauritania to Marseille and struggled for years before finding work as an actor. (Later on, Hondo made a living dubbing Eddie Murphy’s voice for French screens.) Restored by the World Cinema Fund in 2017, Soleil Ô rests alongside Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl (1967) as a rare early account of French discrimination told through the eyes of an immigrant.

Mathieu Kassovitz’s breakthrough second feature hit like a bomb in 1995, bringing hip-hop, stylized violence and the social strife of Paris’ suburbs to mainstream French audiences. After a night of rioting with the police lands a teenager in a coma, three friends — one Jewish, one Black and one North African — vow to seek vengeance, with one of them promising to kill a cop if their buddy dies. They spend the next 24 hours running from the law, fighting skinheads and meeting snobby Parisians, in a pressure-cooker narrative that gets increasingly tense as the day drags on. More sensational than realistic, La Haine won the director’s prize at Cannes and scored over 2 million admissions in France, creating an explosive banlieue genre that has often been copied but rarely equaled.

The story of the Paris Commune of 1871 is rarely taught in schools outside of France. And yet this short-lived episode of revolution, direct democracy, and, ultimately, defeat at the hands of the French army — in a brutal fight that left thousands dead, swaths of Paris in ruins and city hall burnt to the ground — was as action-packed as history gets. In British director Peter Watkins’ fascinating six-hour docudrama, modern TV reporters chronicle events as they unfold inside the commune, showing how Parisians suffering from poverty and oppression mount an insurrection that leads to moments of genuine political freedom — including for women unable to vote — until it all comes crashing down during what’s eerily known in France as “Bloody Week.”

The late Laurent Cantet’s powerful and endearing dramedy focuses on a literature teacher (François Bégaudeau, whose semi-autobiographical novel was adapted into the film) facing a growing revolt from his students in a multiracial junior high located in one of Paris’ tougher neighborhoods. Set almost entirely in the classroom and starring a memorable cast of non-professionals, the film plays as both a fly-on-the-wall look at top-down education and a portrait of French youth fighting both authority and one another. Winner of the Palme d’Or, The Class movingly portrays teenagers — many of them the children of immigrants, if not immigrants themselves — adapting to a rigid system as best as they can, in scenes that can be hilarious, disarming and explosive.

The title of Ladj Ly’s searing feature debut evokes Victor Hugo’s famous novel both dramatically and geographically, with much of it set in the Paris suburb of Montfermeil where Jean Valjean and Cosette first meet in the book. Over two centuries later, that neighborhood has become something akin to the Baltimore of David Simon’s The Wire, with crooked cops, crafty drug dealers, volatile teens and corrupt officials all crossing paths in a single day that ignites after a police officer accidentally shoots down a kid. Ly, who grew up in Montfermeil himself, shows plenty of compassion for his unruly ensemble, in a film that begins with rowdy celebrations following France’s victory in the 2018 World Cup and ends with a violent insurrection against the powers-that-be.

When you look at the group of students in DP-turned-director Marine Atlan’s stunning first feature, you see the same kind of kids that are currently blocking high schools around Paris and the rest of France. Savvy and determined, but also unsure of their futures, if not completely lost at times, they are today’s youth in a nutshell. In La Gradiva, which announces the arrival of a bold new talent, those kids take a senior class trip to Naples that goes from liberating to downright tragic by the last act, revealing the darker forces behind all those beautiful young faces. The movie may not deal directly with what’s happening in the country right now, but it’s as honest and prescient a portrait of the restless next generation as you can get.