Film festival spotlights racism in France as hate crimes increase

LOS ANGELES - Alexandre Amiel was alarmed when his 11-year-old son asked the day after the January 2015 attacks on Charlie Hebdo magazine and a Jewish supermarket in Paris: "Why do they hate us?"

The veteran filmmaker's answer is an unflinching exploration of racism in France at a time when the nationalist politics of presidential candidate Marine Le Pen have become part of the political mainstream, and racially-motivated attacks are on the rise.

Why Do They Hate Us?, which gets its US premiere on Sunday as part of the Colcoa festival of French film in Los Angeles, is a documentary with a difference.

Like a nonfiction version of Mathieu Kassovitz's groundbreaking 1995 movie La Haine, Amiel's three part documentary is told from his own perspective as a Jew but also through the eyes of a black man and Arab woman.

"We did three stories with people who are not especially victims of racism, but are going to take the audience by the hand and bring them a narration with two sides," said Amiel, 43.

"First, it's your own story and then it's an investigation of what racism is today."

Amiel - a "cultural but not practicing Jew" and a highly-regarded former TV reporter - originally made Why Do They Hate Us? as a trilogy of television documentaries shown in France last year.

Clips of the filmmakers' exchanges with extremists were viewed online nearly 20 million times, prompting their theatrical release as one two-hour movie.

It comes as hate crimes against minorities are rocketing in France, up 22.4 percent in just one year to 2,034 incidents in 2015, with anti-Muslim hate crimes more than doubling.

The candidates in the upcoming French election represent a stark choice. Amiel, a liberal on the left of the political spectrum, describes centrist and presidential favorite Emmanuel Macron as the candidate he "dislikes the least".

"In the US, Trump was elected. In England, we didn't believe that they would leave Europe and they did. Maybe we learned a little bit from what happened elsewhere, we showed that we can sometimes be more intelligent. It doesn't happen often," he said.