Athena: Is The Netflix Movie Inspired By A True Story? Meaning Of The Title Athena?
Does the French film produced by Netflix Athena tell a story that happened? The shortest and simplest answer is no, but it does not convey the complexity and meaning of a film made in France and presented in a competition at the Venice Film Festival. Athena by Romain Gavras is a film that tells the rebellion of the Parisian neighborhood of the same name, a group of popular blocks of flats in which mostly migrants and second or third-generation French people live. Athena is a popular and poor suburb, where the inhabitants look suspiciously at the authorities, particularly at the police.
For a large part of the Muslim faith, Athena’s population is composed of several generations and different political and social orientations. There are the faithful of the imam who would like to live as much as possible in harmony with the institutions, there are “gray” figures in collusion with a local crime or even with the smell of terrorism, finally, there is no shortage of young and very young people, whose anger against discrimination suffered in France explodes after a dramatic episode. The film opens with the death of a boy named Idir, shot in a video: in the same, we see a group of uniformed policemen who surround him and beat him savagely, for no apparent reason.
What’s True in Athena?
There are two central figures in the film: Abdel (Dali Benssalah), a soldier recalled from the front at home because he is a relative of the victim, and Karim (Sami Slimane), brother of Abdel and the dead boy, who becomes the charismatic leader of the revolt. Athena’s siblings are not based on real people, nor is the story of the beating video inspired by real French news stories.
The screenwriters of the film Elias Belkeddar, Romain Gavras, and Ladj Ly (former director of the hit The Miserables) wanted to tell a story that told of how a local event could spread throughout the city and nationally, becoming the spark of the revolt. In this sense, the riots that have occurred several times in the Parisian Banlieue, the “difficult” suburbs that have sometimes risen to the headlines of the international news for the violent clashes between police and inhabitants that have taken place here have certainly been inspiring. Athena aims to photograph the uncomfortable reality of second and third-generation French youth, with a strong neighborhood identity and a rage ready to erupt against a society and a police force that marginalizes and targets them.
Compared to the aforementioned I miserabili (and its intense ending), Athena focuses more on a “civil war” that takes place within a family. Director and co-writer Romain Gavras explained that this construction is intentional and harks back to the Greek tragedy. Raised in a family where the classics of Greek theater were told instead of fairy tales, Gavras wanted to write a contemporary and French tragedy, whose conflict takes place both within the neighborhood, between different age groups and orientations, and within a family.
What Is The Meaning Of The Title Athena?
Taking this information into consideration, it is easier to explain the title of the film as well: Athena is not a real neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris. During the film, however, young people arrive from other Parisian neighborhoods to give support to the rioters and we hear about the real suburbs of the French capital. The name Athena is a reference to the culture of ancient Greece that generated the tragedies that inspired Gavras. Athena was the goddess of war and wisdom in ancient Greek culture, which gave its name to the city of Athens: a fitting reference concerning the brothers, intelligent and sometimes warlike, protagonists of the film.
