If there is a North African French cultural elite, then 45-year-old actor Reda Kateb is among their ranks.

His great uncle was the Algerian writer Kateb Yacine, and his father Malek-Eddine Kateb is also an actor. You are likely to see his films at festivals, with him playing the down-to-earth and dependable supporting actor who seems to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders.

In the 2022 film "Our Brothers" shown in the Bader selection judged by 18-25-year-olds at the Ajyal Film Festival, Kateb plays the brother of Malik Oussekine, who was killed during the student protests in 1986. In Rachid Bouchareb’s film, the story of Malik is coupled with the murder of Abdel Benyahia by a police officer in the suburbs of Paris. The way the film is shot, for a good 20 minutes it’s difficult to tell the stories apart for those who are not familiar with the names of these young people who were killed in the 80s.

The film starts with real TV footage of the protests against the "Devaquet law," which proposed making university entrance in France more selective and also introducing tuition fees. The footage comes as a reminder of the protest culture in France, where the people take to the streets whenever they have a grievance with the government. Some people, naturally, find it easier to protest than others, because they know the police will treat them more fairly. "Our Brothers" is the story of two young people of North African origin who get caught up in the rising tensions caused by the events, and not even in the events themselves. One can argue, of course, that having a darker skin color is a hazard at any given period of time, with or without large-scale demonstrations.

The film properly gets to a start at the morgue where an African Frenchman is reciting prayers over the dead bodies of men who are waiting to be claimed by their relatives. For now, he is their next of kin, trying to give them a ritual of passage. This is where the stories of Malik and Abdel meet and continue visually intertwined throughout the film.

Reminding us that this is a period piece, after the footage of the protests and Mitterrand talking on TV, the film starts with the police on motorcycles going to break up a protest. Bouchareb has chosen to overlay this sequence with North African music and it gives the scene a very eerie feel. At the end of the film, we are told that the motorized anti-riot police were disbanded after these events and were re-introduced during the Yellow Vests protests recently. Throughout the film, they are shown to be very tough men, who are encouraged by each other and their superiors to be as careless as possible with the public they are supposed to be serving.

There is, of course, one good cop, as there always must be, trying to bring down the tension between the families of the dead and the state. This involves lying to the families and making them wait to see the bodies of their loved ones. There is another "not bad" cop, the boyfriend of Malik’s sister, and I did wonder if the script was taking liberties with the story in order to give us a "both sides of the violence divide" perspective. Reda Kateb plays Malik’s brother, who seems unwilling to believe that the French police, a representative of the French state, may have killed his brother during his disappearance. He and his sister live in comfortable flats in Paris and have clearly had the benefit of a good education. They have done well by France. He is the one calming down other members of the family, sure that his brother will be returned to him alive. He is, of course, then, the one who feels the most betrayed when he sees his brother’s lifeless body, and it is a heart-wrenching scene indeed.

The police "explain" to him that they thought for a while that the body was of a Phalangist (more references to 80s politics) Lebanese man. Then Mohamed says a few things that seem like a summary of the official French Muslim identity. "No," he says "he was French," and when the Lebanese Phalange Party argument is pushed again he says "No, he was Muslim." This was the formulation in the early 2000s that French Muslims thought would get them equal citizenship. If you protested that you were French first and Muslim second, the republic would welcome you with open arms. Well, the jury’s out on that one.

However, the twist here is that Mohamed, when trying to understand the last few days of his brother, finds out that Malik was hoping to train to be a Jesuit priest, somewhat nullifying the second part of the French and Muslim identity mantra. It is hard for Mohamed to come to terms with the fact that his little brother had taken a few more steps than himself to become a model French citizen. In the film representation, he handles his frustration very well, speaking to the priests who too were trying to understand Malik’s search for meaning, but God moves in mysterious ways.

While in the suburbs of Paris, Abdel’s father and brother represent another class of French Muslim citizens, earning their living by skilled manual labor, and may not have pretensions to Frenchness quite as strongly as the Oussekine family. It is with them that the film closes, huddled in front of the television where the news is showing what a promising young man he was. Here we revert to actual footage of Abdel talking about how he has benefited from the training scheme he was on, and now feels he has better prospects. Prospects put an end to state-sanctioned violence.

Bouchareb does an excellent job of bringing the stories of these two young men to light, reminding French citizens that the system is always more likely to sacrifice those of another race or another class in "public" and violent negotiations. The film can also be read as a call to insist on the truth and the remembrance of the brutality that went into the making of many French (and European) institutions that remain exclusionary to this day.