About this Event
France's Children (75 minutes): Screening and Q&A
Tuesday, October 20, 2026, 6 PM
Busboys and Poets, Brookland: 625 Monroe St NE, Washington, DC 20017
Join us for a screening of France's Children, presented in partnership with Drop Site and followed by a Q&A with director Aida Alami, moderated by Ryan Grim.
March 2017: five years after her brother Amine was killed by a police officer, activist Amal Bentounsi finally comes face to face with the man who shot him. As the trial unfolds, Amal and fellow organizers transform a courtroom proceeding into a national challenge to police violence, racism, and exclusion in contemporary France.
But the courtroom is only part of the story. Outside, a much larger battle is unfolding over who gets to define the country's values, whose suffering is acknowledged, and whose version of events becomes history. Following Amal, Nadia, Yasser, Nassim, and other human rights defenders over five pivotal days, the film captures a generation of French citizens, many of them children of immigrants from North and West Africa, who refuse to remain on the margins of the national narrative.
Drawing inspiration from Black American liberation movements while confronting France's own unresolved colonial legacy, they challenge a country that promises equality yet often struggles to recognize the experiences of its minority communities. France's Children is a portrait of political awakening, collective resistance, and a generation determined to tell its own story.
About the director
Aida Alami is a Moroccan journalist, educator, and documentarian. A longtime contributor to The New York Times, she has also written for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and National Geographic. For more than a decade, her reporting has focused on migration, religion, social movements, and political change across North Africa, Europe, the United States, and the Caribbean. She directed France's Children.
Event venue & nearby stays
Busboys and Poets, 625 Monroe Street Northeast, Washington, United States
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