Французская демократия: Машинима о расизме и бунтах

2005 French short film

The French Democracy is a 2005 English language French short political film made by Alex Chan using computer animation from Lionhead Studios' 2005 business simulation game The Movies. The plot centers on three Moroccan men who turn to rioting after facing different forms of discrimination. Chan, a French native of Chinese descent, created the film to convey his view that racism caused the riots of the 2005 civil unrest in France. Although Chan was restricted by shortcomings and technical limitations in The Movies, he finished the film after four days of production. The film was uploaded to The Movies Online, Lionhead's website for user created videos, on 22 November 2005 and was soon covered by American and French press. Although real time rendered, three dimensional computer animation (machinima) had been used in earlier political films, The French Democracy attained an unprecedented level of mainstream attention for political machinima. While acknowledging the film's flaws, such as the grammatically poor English subtitles, commentators praised its clear political message and compared it to films such as La Haine and Do the Right Thing. The French Democracy inspired other politically conscious machinima works and fueled discussion about the art form's potential for political expression. Some raised concerns that video game companies would use their copyrights to control the content of derivative machinima films.

The French Democracy begins with a re enactment of the real life 27 October 2005 event that triggered riots in France: the electrocution of two teenagers, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré. In the film, the youths attempt to hide from police in a building near an electric power station. In a televised speech, the Minister of the Interior vows to increase efforts to fight crime. Three fictional Moroccan men discuss the recent events and disagree with means used by the police, and feel that blacks are unfairly targeted. They face different forms of discrimination: overnight detention for lack of a passport during an identity check, refusal of employment and housing rental, and police brutality.

Alex Chan, 27 years old at the time of the civil unrest, was a French born freelance industrial designer whose parents were Chinese immigrants from Hong Kong. Although Chan was successful professionally, he felt that there was racial and cultural discrimination in France, based on his own previous attempts to find housing and violence directed towards him. near housing projects where rioting had caused the destruction of cars owned by acquaintances. Chan wanted instead to depict "more human"</blockquote>

Although he had no previous film making experience, in which he completed the film in three or four days. and to include the Empire State Building in the background.

Under the pseudonym Koulamata, Chan uploaded the finished film to The Movies Online on 22 November 2005. Some viewers praised it, but others criticized the poor subtitles or the portrayal of police action against minorities. Lionhead's selection of The French Democracy as a "hot pick" The Washington Post and MTV originally created religious connotations by incorrectly labeling Chan's characters as Muslims; they issued corrected stories after Chan complained. in the subtitles, and BusinessWeek deemed them "stilted and ungrammatical". He argued that the work's power lay in its "simplicité extrême" (extreme simplicity) and in the "fonctionnement logique" (logical operation) of the underlying video game. BusinessWeek wrote that "the combination of amateurish technique and a strong emotional message is oddly moving", and Rooster Teeth Productions' comedy series Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles. The French Democracy was, according to Alterités, "evidence that 'technological innovations are being used to satisfy the thirst for public expression", and Olli Sotamaa felt that the work justified further research into connections between citizenship and video gaming. Peter Molyneux, chief executive officer of Lionhead Studios, praised Chan's "timely and poignant" In CineAction, Elijah Horwatt wrote that Thuyen Nguyen's 2006 An Unfair War, a criticism of the Iraq War, similarly attempts "to speak for those who cannot". Joshua Garrison mimicked Chan's "political pseudo documentary style" Although initially undecided, Chan eventually became a professional machinima film maker. His later work includes World of Electors, a series about the 2007 French presidential election. He argued that machinima's outstanding copyright issues and possible marginalization constrained potential for expression.