Did the French movie "Athena" warn people about the turmoil in France? No, that's not true; the film "Athena" did not predict the cycle of violence that broke in France after a 17-year-old boy named Nael was shot and killed by a French policeman during a traffic stop.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) published by Tiktok on July 4, 2023, under the title "Events in France are premeditated; there are no coincidences." It opened:
"In the Movie Athene, everything was planned to start a war."
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Tue Jul 18 13:25:07 2023 UTC)
The French movie "Athena," was released on Netflix on September 2022. The film's plot does not resemble what occurred in France this summer. The movie talks about how racial unrest in France is provoked by right-wing instigators who pretended to be policemen, beat up a young boy of Algerian descent, and left him for dead to insight chaos.
There are some similarities in the scene of chaos and young men rioting and destroying public properties, but unfortunately, these scenes are not uncommon in France.
Police brutality has been an issue that the French government has been struggling with for years, as more incidents are coming to light and sparking public outrage, like the civil unrest in 2007 when two teenagers died after the bike they drove collided with a police van. Similarly, violence broke out in July 2009 after a French man of Algerian descent died in police custody.
