French Propaganda Film Justifies Riots

A French-Chinese Buddhist has produced the first known computer-animated agitprop, to "send a message of tolerance."

The coverage didn't cut it, Alex Chan felt, so he decided to tell his version of the recent violence that rocked his suburb north of Paris.

But rather than a blog or video diary, he turned to a new computer game that allows players to produce a short film and post it online.

He made it with English subtitles "to correct what was being said in the media, especially in the United States, who linked what was happening, the riots, to terrorism and put the blame on the Muslim community," said Chan, a practicing Buddhist.

Produced in just a week and released Nov. 22, his short film has been hailed as a breakthrough for the obscure technique known as machinima — the use of characters, sets and scenes culled from video games to create an original film.

"There has never been a machinima with such a clear and prominent political message," said Xavier Lardy, founder of the French specialist Web site http://www.machinima.fr/.

The characters move stiffly and the English subtitles are riddled with mistakes, but the 13-minute animated "The French Democracy" is turning the 27-year-old Chan into a poster boy for a budding trend in home moviemaking.

An industrial designer with no previous filmmaking experience, he saw his film as a way to bypass traditional media and send a message of tolerance to young people, using video images they could easily relate to. But even Chan is surprised that his fledgling effort has made such a splash.

The film tells the story of three black youths who suffer from racial discrimination and end up throwing bombs at cars and buildings.

"They become angry and maybe they have no other way to express themselves, and finally this is the only way they have of getting heard. That's why I picked this title, `The French Democracy,'" Chan told The Associated Press. "It's a little ironic, in the sense that these youths, for now, have preferred using petrol bombs rather than vote ballots to make themselves heard."

A little ironic, huh. How about a little . . . barbaric? violent? illegal?

Chan, born in Paris of Chinese parents, said he has also experienced discrimination because of his Asian appearance.

Yet he expresses himself by making a computer-animated movie, rather than lobbing Molotov cocktails. Now why is that?

His film is strongly inspired by real-life events, with one character representing Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy calling for a crackdown against the rioters, while another right-wing politician advocates kicking foreigners out of France.

Right, because only eeeevil right-wingers would be so inhumane as to suggest that illegal immigrants who are also a violent scourge on society should perhaps be deported to their country of citizenship.

View the virulently anti-police "The French Democracy" here.