VENICE – MISSION. Weekend in Venice lay in a daze and queues. Lines for cinemas, lines for the Lido boat, for a sandwich, even for the toilet. During peak hours, you enter the press center with a priority card, like in banks … In general, the crowds that this year flocked to Samples combined with the (incredible) tourist flow in the city itself, caused a mini-chaos.

The only thing that can be compared with the latter is the doom that reigns in the opening scene – and in general in the entire first part – “Athena”, his film. Romain Le Havre who participates in the competition of this year’s Festival. The commander of the police station, somewhat bewildered, makes statements to reporters. Something very bad happened. Below, a group of young people are already in hoods and finally rush to throw flares, Molotov cocktails, stones. The carnage continues until the attackers escape in a van driving towards the Athena checkpoint. That’s the name of a workers’ housing complex in a suburb of Paris that seems to have rebelled.

All this time, the camera closely follows what is happening, rotates, looks down or is fixed on the shoulders of the main characters. It’s a stunningly choreographed action scene that would be the envy of any seasoned Hollywood blockbuster maker. The plot of Gavras’ film is police violence and the uncontrollable consequences that it can cause. The uprising in the Parisian suburbs is not science fiction, and Gavras handles it with gritty realism, masterfully, at least to the point of trying to deal with politics in words rather than images.

However, at the relevant press conference, he stated (correctly) that “it’s a more action-oriented movie, without the good guys and the bad guys. The problem of violence in the suburbs is very complex. People are drawn to violence by forces, often invisible. The film shows exactly what happens in such cases. Many in the past may have accused Romain Gavras of being superficial or that the aesthetic of his films is too reminiscent of music videos, but the directorial achievement he presents here is simply unique and worthy of being included in next Saturday’s awards. About the rest of the interesting things, good and bad, that we saw in the last days in Venice, we will talk in more detail in our next, more detailed note, shortly before our return to Athens.