French Police Violence Drama ‘After The Fire’ Hit By Right-Wing Smear Campaign, Say Filmmakers

After The Fire The Film

The producer and distributor of French police violence drama After The Fire, which world premiered in Toronto’s Discovery line-up this year, say the film’s theatrical release has been damaged by a right-wing smear campaign.

Moves against the picture include a push to lower the work’s public score on cinema website Allociné (France’s equivalent to a Rotten Tomatoes rating), as well as the spread of disinformation around the production by right-leaning outlets such as CNews, which is France’s GB News or Fox News.

The drama stars popular singer and actress Camélia Jordana as a woman seeking justice after her younger brother dies in suspicious circumstances in police custody.

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It is the first feature of Mehdi Fikri who spent a decade working as a reporter covering social conflict and the issues of police violence and justice in France’s notoriously deprived out-of-town suburbs.

Conceived by Fikri over the course of many years and shot last year, the work took on fresh resonance while in post-production following the shooting dead by a police officer of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk on the outskirts of Paris in June, after he fled a traffic stop.

The death provoked riots in cities across France and reignited a long-running public debate about police violence. The police officer accused of firing the deadly shot has since been released under judicial supervision while the case makes its way through the courts.

Against this backdrop, the film’s release by Bac Films on November 15 has been a rocky ride.

A number of conservative media outlets have taken pot shots at the film.

Le Point magazine called the picture “a propaganda film” and erroneously suggested it was a thinly veiled account of the circumstances surrounding the death of Adama Traoré, whose death at the age of 24 in police custody in 2016 has since been compared to that of George Floyd in 2020.

The article went on to pick holes in Fikri’s interpretation of Traoré’s story even though the film is not about this individual case.

The Traoré disinformation, which was covered by a number of outlets, led the production to put out a statement asserting that the film was not based on an individual real-life case and that Jordana’s character represented all the “sisters, mothers, aunts, fathers and brothers” who were campaigning for justice.

Disinformation about the film’s budget and how much state funding it received has also circulated, with reports that 36% of the €2.5 million budget had come from public funds.

Producer Michael Gentile at Paris-based Le Film says these claims are wrong.

He notes the film did not qualify for the Advance on Receipts support of the National Cinema Centre (CNC) but received instead a €70,000 diversity grant and €340,000 in support from the East + Métropole Strasbourg region.

“France 3 Cinema which contributed €500,000 to the financing cannot be considered as public aid since it is a pre-purchase for the channel and a co-production of 30%,” he explained.

“The part that can be considered as state backing is around €400,000 on a budget of €2.5 million, or 16% of the budget.”

Bac Films CEO David Grumbach suggests the campaign against the film has severely dented the film’s performance at the box office.

“As of today, we’re at 17,000 admissions after the first week… we were expecting around 100,000,” he told Deadline on Thursday.

“The attacks have clearly harmed the film’s performance,” he continued. “After the Nahel affair the subject [of police violence] became very touchy. And above all awakened the fascist sphere which was incredibly violent towards the actors and the film on the social networks,” he added.

Bac Films was forced to close the comment section on the YouTube page for the trailer, and also scaled back plans to stimulate public debate around the issues tackled in the film.

“We also had a number of cancellations by TV stations, for news or talk shows, which preferred not to invite us so as to not attract the attention of the fascist sphere and to focus rather on ‘feel good’ films,” said Grumbach.

“But we remain very proud of the film and despite the disappointment of the box office, we are happy with the result… The film will be broadcast on France 3, OCS and Netflix.”

In the backdrop, Allociné has confirmed in a post on its site that it had registered a push to manipulate the film’s score, with the rating falling to 1.4 out of 5.0 before the film had even played its first theatrical screening.

The site said there had been larger than normal numbers of votes and reviews published by newly created accounts, while the votes had tended to be very low or very high.

“A figure to illustrate this unusual distribution of ratings: at the time of writing, more than 70% correspond to a so-called extreme rating, that is to say either a 0.5 or a 5,” said the site.

It noted that the average critics score of 3.1 was more in keeping with what would have been expected for the film.

French directors’ guild La Société des Réalisatrices et Réalisateurs de Films (SRF) put out a statement on Wednesday, saying the push against After The Fire was a part of wider attack on culture by the extreme right.

The body said similar sorts of campaigns had been waged by extreme right groups against Philippe Faucon’s 2016 film Amin, about a Senegalese migrant worker in Paris who begins a relationship with a French woman, as well as the 2022 films, Lola Quivoron’s dirt bike drama Rodéo and Émilie Frèche’s In A Better World, about a family that clandestinely take in a young migrant boy.

“It’s clear that we are witnessing a resolute, massive and coordinated offensive by this movement against the cultural field, in which cinema, as a popular art par excellence, is a privileged target,” said the SRF.

“Even if we SRF filmmakers remain viscerally attached to freedom of expression, we strongly denounce these intimidatory tactics because they in reality seek to practice de facto censorship which does not say not its name.

“They thus undermine the creative freedom of filmmakers and the free distribution of works. By attacking the plurality of stories and subjects, they also endanger the right to fiction, an essential element of life in a democracy.”