Rock Against Police
2020 · 30m · France
Directed by Nabil Djedouani
Genres: documentary, essay film, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, provocative
In February 1980, young Abdelkader Lareiche was shot dead by a building caretaker in a Vitry housing estate; forty years later, Philomène meets the militants of the Rock Against Police movement born from racist crimes and a security crackdown.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Most people would make this a straightforward protest doc, but Djedouani refuses—he's turned a tragedy into this formally restless essay that won't sit still, which means it actually earns its anger instead of just performing it.
A rigorous work of archival essay cinema that knows exactly where it stands in the lineage of political documentary; the forty-year distance between Lareiche's death and Philomène's encounter with his legacy becomes the formal architecture itself, not just the subject.
The decision to let silence and archival gaps do the narrative work instead of filling them—that's what makes this feel like witnessing something rather than being told a story; it's a restraint that costs everything.