THE DAILY BEAST
By Tracy McNicoll
April 28, 2014
In 24 Days, opening this week in Paris, filmmaker Alexandre Arcady sets out to expose the motives and the meaning behind a savage crime.
It was a ghastly tragedy that rattled a nation and became a byword for anti-Semitism in France. In January 2006, just weeks after riots had set aflame the troubled banlieues and housing projects throughout the country, a single horrific killing exposed an icy violence that was in its way even more shocking. Ilan Halimi, 23, was kidnapped by the self-styled “Gang of Barbarians” and tortured to death because he was Jewish and they thought his family or other Jews would pay for his freedom.
Now eight years on, the story is coming to cinemas in France. Alexandre Arcady’s 24 Days: The Truth About the Ilan Halimi Affair opens Wednesday, the first of two French feature films on the case due out in 2014. And in a nation where Europe’s largest Jewish community is still reeling from the recent fight to censor a notorious comedian spewing anti-Semitic hate, it is bound to touch a nerve.
Indeed, in the wake of the controversy over the dubious humorist Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, which saw his stage shows banned in several French cities in January, the Jewish community has expressed concern that anti-Semitic acts, which were down 31 percent in France last year, could rise.
And when 24 Days director Arcady describes Ilan Halimi as the first person murdered for being Jewish in France since the Second World War, it is lost on no one that he was not the last. During Mohamed Merah’s al Qaeda-inspired killing spree in 2012, the motorcycle-riding gunman slaughtered three children and a rabbi outside a Jewish school in Toulouse.
ArchitectGuy on Israel 