Barbara Schweizerhof on Reading Europe's Youth Protests Through a Venice Film

Writing for Freitag!, Barbara Schweizerhof recalls a French film she saw at the Venice festival to frame how outside observers judge Europe's protest wave. In the movie, Melvil Poupaud plays a middle-aged man reckoning with past relationships and a failed writing career while walking through a Paris of barricades, street fighting and thrown Molotov cocktails. Shot sometime the previous year and set in a kind of near future, the unrest stays in the background; characters shrug it off or comment with muted cynicism, treating revolt as someone else's business — the young. Schweizerhof names the film as Un peu avant minuit. She also cites a second title, Possible Love, described as a film about inequality, and notes that the wars in Gaza and Ukraine smolder behind the picture. Reactions to the protests, she writes, split into distinct camps. The piece is a Freitag! column, dated to the day and presented as part of the publication's daily Blick auf den Tag.