Who was Malik Oussekine whose drama is the subject of an event series?

Never before has a fiction or a French production related the drama of Malik Oussekine, a French student of Algerian origin, who died after being beaten up by the police on the night of December 5 to 6, 1986. It is now told at the screen, 36 years later, with “Oussekine” by Antoine Chevrollier (“Black Baron”, “The Office of Legends”). The series of 4 episodes of one hour each, richly documented, will be available from March 11 on the Disney+ platform.

“Malik had lots of dreams, desires to learn, he was a young man like any other. His story is one of injustice”, believes actor Sayyid El Alami, who plays the 22-year-old young man victim of the brutality of “voltigeurs”, these representatives of order on motorcycles, who came to disperse by force demonstrators then opposed to the reform of universities, the Devaquet bill. Malik Oussekine, however, had nothing to do with the student movement, he was leaving a jazz concert and found himself facing police armed with sticks who chased him and beat him to death in the lobby of a building of rue Monsieur-le-Prince in Paris where he expected to find refuge.

Watch our interview with Sayyid El Alami:

The series looks back on the circumstances of Malik Oussekine’s death and the wave of emotion generated in the country, on the many marches that followed his disappearance and bringing together thousands of students from France and Europe, teachers, parents … History has retained from this popular reaction the formula “Never again”. Never again police violence, never again racism.

After the disappearance of Malik Oussekine, the members of his family wage a bitter fight, supported by the lawyer Maître Georges Kiejman, so that the truth emerges in the face of the State’s attempts to stifle the affair on the pretext of a death which would first be the consequence of a renal pathology in Malik. The series also addresses the desire to discredit the young man by passing him off as a terrorist, surfing on the deadly attack in the rue de Rennes a few weeks earlier in Paris and perpetrated by a terrorist network on behalf of Lebanese Hezbollah.

The year 1986 also brings us back to cohabitation with, on the one hand, a Minister of Security (Robert Pandraud) and of the Interior (Charles Pasqua) anchored on the right and taking the side of defending the police institution and the another, a socialist president, François Mitterrand, who will choose to go to the home of the Oussekine family to express “his pain in the face of this great misfortune”, accompanied by television cameras.

“It seemed essential to us to also tell the instrumentalization of the affair. The family had to grieve in this context where all of a sudden the missing son becomes an issue that politicians are fighting over”reports Julien Lilti, one of the co-authors of the series “Oussekine” and interviewed by franceinfo.

Three years later, at the end of their trial, two police officers prosecuted for “bodily harm resulting in death without intention to give it” receive suspended prison sentences. Sarah, the sister of Malik Oussekine says to herself “more than disappointed”. “I think especially of my mother, I’m going to go home and tell her here, the guys who killed Malik are free.” These remarks, like many others made at the time of the events, are transcribed to the letter in the series which has been the subject of long exchanges with the family and of an important work of research of the facts, archives, testimonies.

The tragedy of Malik Oussekine has since prompted a rare book, “The unworthy death of Malik Oussekine”, written by Nathalie Prévost, then a journalism student and college friend of Sarah Oussekine. And many references in the music as in the title “The state kills” of the group Assassin who raps “None of us wants to end up like Malik Oussekine”. The song is in the movie “Hate” by Mathieu Kassovitz and gave Antoine Chevrollier the desire to shoot the series on “Oussekine”.

More recently, a “Malik Oussekine” tag appears in the film “Supremes” devoted to the origins of the NTM group and the malaise in the French suburbs at the end of the 1980s.

As luck would have it, another work also returns this month to the death of Malik Oussekine with “Our Brothers”, a feature film by Rachid Bouchareb with Reda Kateb in particular. The film will be screened at the Cannes Film Festival (Cannes Première) which begins on May 17. “Excellent news, in the eyes of Antoine Chevrollier. The more the name resonates, the more the story will be told and the more work will be done. We are together (with Rachid Bouchareb in this work).”