Recent events in France remind us of the plot of the recently released French film Athena, which tells the story of how the murder of a young Algerian-French boy by the police sparks a civil war in France. Our discussion begins with a devastating spoiler—I highly recommend, therefore, that anyone who has not watched Athena do so before proceeding, as it is, in my estimation, one of the best films to come out in recent memory.
This is not a review, however, and the spoiler I am leading up to—revealed in the very last scene—is key to the present discussion: For after the violence and tragedy of the plot have run their course, we learn that it was not police officers who murdered the lad, but some criminals belonging to a far-right group disguised as police, precisely in order to coax immigrant communities into rioting against security forces and so initiate a civil war.
