ABSTRACT
Produced in 2004, Karin Albou’s film La Petite Jérusalem was released in France on 14 December 2005, shortly after the historic riots shook Parisian suburbs, along with 250 other towns and cities throughout the country, in October and November 2005. ‘Les émeutes des banlieues de 2005’ – also called ‘civil unrest’1 – prompted President Jacques Chirac to declare a state of emergency on 8 November 2005. These riots were triggered by the deaths of two teenagers (Zyed Benna, 17, and Bouna Traoré, 15) on 27 October 2005 in Clichy-sous-Bois (a suburb located east of Paris). The two boys were accidentally electrocuted while hiding in an electricity substation trying to escape the police, who were conducting identity checks. The police had been called to investigate a suspected burglary. The deaths of the two teenagers, who were apparently innocent and only heading home after attending a football game, triggered the biggest wave of civil unrest in France since the May 1968 events. It revealed the tensions between what could be termed the ‘center’ and the ‘periphery’ of France, whereby high unemployment rates, lack of opportunity, police harassment, and covert discrimination foster feelings of exclusion among young people living in the poorer Parisian ‘banlieues’. Given the fact that a great majority of these young suburb-dwellers are second-or third-generation Muslim immigrants from Africa, notably from the north, many commentators perceived these riots as a result of French society’s negative perceptions of Islam and of the social discrimination imposed on immigrants.2
