24 Days [Blu-ray]

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Product Description A tense and timely thriller, 24 Days tells the heart-breaking true story of the 2006 kidnapping of 23-year old Ilan Halimi from his Paris suburb by a group calling themselves The Gang of Barbarians. Backed by a top-notch cast, director Alexandre Arcady's white-knuckle film follows the massive police manhunt and the Halimi family's nightmarish ordeal as they race against the clock to find Ilan and his abductors. 24 Days shines a light on the racial tension and anti-Semitism that continues to make headlines in France Review Gripping. Impossible to forget. Critic's Pick of the Week --Los Angeles TimesThe movie, "24 Days," re-opens fresh wounds triggered by French anti-Semitism, because the harrowing tale zeroes in on the twenty-four days in the winter of 2006 when a 23-year-old Jewish Parisian, Ilan Halimi, was kidnapped and tortured and eventually killed. The gripping film--which speeds along like a fast-paced thriller--is based on the true events surrounding Halimi's murder. Directed by Alexandre Arcady, the movie has has already garnered top awards at several film festivals and opens in theaters around the United States (and via i-tunes) on April 24, inspired by the book co-written by Halimi's mother, Ruth Halimi. With brilliant all-too-real suspense, the movie depicts the grueling experience of Halimi's family as they tried to plead with the French police to save their son. Despite Ruth Halimi's insistence, Parisian police considered the case as an ordinary kidnapping for ransom, failing to recognize the anti-Semitic hatred of Halimi's abductors. It is this blindness in the face of racism against Jews, that continues to resonate in France today. This deliberate nonchalance--or a squashing of the bitter truth--reveals how French society still ignores the reality of French anti-Semitism, illuminating what writer Marc Weitzmann calls the Jews ;civic loneliness within France. Halimi's kidnapping was not random. The idea of finding a Jew was the deliberate plan, and fell under the supervision of a Frenchman whose parents migrated from the Ivory Coast, Youssouf Fofana. Fofana was head of a gang called "the gang of the Barbarians" whose stated intention was to abduct Jews for ransom. The gang members focused on Jews because they assumed that as Fofana claimed, all Jews are rich and would pay for the release of their victims. The set-up was simple, almost cliché. Sometime in early 2006, the gang began to search for a victim along Paris' Boulevard Voltaire, looking for (in Fofana's words) Jewish stores to find the appropriate person. They zeroed in on Halimi, a telephone salesman, and then the gang used an attractive female member as bait. . In this case, 17-year-old Sorour Arbabzadeh. who flirted with him, gave him her telephone number, and managed to get him to agree to meet her at a café on January 20. She lured him to an empty apartment; after that, for the next 24 days, Halimi was tortured and held in a boiler room in a building in Bagneux, a southern suburb of Paris, until he died. The film raises the question: why was the gang able to act with such impunity? Had French police already given up on certain Parisian suburbs, similar to the way the police in other cities such as Marmo, Sweden, have surrendered to mostly Muslim street rule? Even the 36-year-old French-Christian concierge of the building where Halimi was held knew that there was a kidnapping victim there, but he claimed that he was frightened of the gang. No one, not one anonymous person, was willing to call the police to rescue Halimi. That nobody appealed for help makes the anguish of Ilan Halimi's mother, Ruth, played with fervor and conviction by Zabou Breitman, all the more tangible. She argues with the police, pleads with them, to no avail. She also tried to prove that this was an act of blatant anti-Semitism--in fact, one of the gang members, Jérôme Ribeiro, had Nazi posters in his room. But nobody wanted to focus on that fact, in the same way that President Obama--after the terrorist attack in the Parisian kosher supermarket in January 2015 which left four dead--remarked that it was ;a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli The Gang of barbarians, aptly named, were not mere thugs, but anti-Semitic terrorists who singled out the Jews. The kidnapping was not random, just as the supermarket attack was not random. --Huffington PostSticking dangerously close to the real-life incident that inspired it, 24 Days (24 Jours: La Verite sur l affaire Ilan Halimi) offers up a white-knuckle dramatization of the nearly month-long kidnapping and torture of 23-year-old Ilan Halimi, whose traumatic ordeal at the hands of the Gang of Barbarians prompted a massive police manhunt and, eventually, a national outcry against anti-Semitism in France. Adapted by director Alexandre Arcady ( Break of Dawn ) from an account co-written by the victim s mother, Ruth Halimi, the film is not always subtle in its portrayal of a family ripped apart by tragedy, but remains captivating as a pure procedural that raises questions about the Paris police's handling of such situations, as well as about the state of race relations in contemporary France. Released at home prior to the Cannes Film Festival, the film could see strong opening numbers amid lots of press coverage, while it s subject matter and solid performances should spark interest abroad.Backed by a terrific cast featuring Zabou Breitman (The Minister) as Ruth Halimi, Pascal Elbe (The Other Son) as Ilan s father, Didier, Jacques Gamblin (The Finishers) as Police Commander Delcour, and Sylvie Testud (Sagan) as negotiator-psychologist Brigitte Farell, the story remains faithful to events as they were perceived by Ruth and her loved ones, cutting between various viewpoints (the cops, the family, the kidnappers, the captive) and dashing ahead in mostly chronological order. To that extent, 24 Days can sometimes feel like a thrilling 2-hour episode of, well, 24, with twists and turns coming at you from every direction as the clock keeps ticking. Where the screenplay (by Arcady, Emilie Freche and Antoine Lacomblez) and mise-en-scene work less well is in a few heavily wrought emotional moments that ring falsely, with Arcady laying on the pathos as Armand Amar s score churns out constant tear-jerking melodies. It s not that tears shouldn t be shed for such a devastating affair, but this is the kind of movie where, when somebody drops a plate on the floor, it comes crashing down in slow motion with all the blistering force of an Airbus 380. Yet while subtlety is not always Arcady s forte, he does an impressive job covering the incident from several angles at once, beginning on January 21, 2006, when charming cell phone vendor, Ilan (Syrus Shahidi), was lured by a woman to the suburbs of Paris, then kidnapped by a brutal gang of thugs lead by the vicious Youssouf Fofana (Tony Harrison). Hoping to obtain a ransom of 450,000 ($622,000) because, as someone says, you re Jews, you have money, Fofana contacts Ilan s parents, threatening to hurt their son if they don t pay up. Little does he know that they both live rather modestly, Ruth working as a doorwoman in an office building and long-separated from her husband, Didier, who runs a small clothing store. When the family goes to the police to report the crime, the movie picks up the pace as Commander Delcour and his unit begin tracking the assailants -- a process made difficult by the fact that Fofana is first running operations from the Ivory Coast, where he switches out cell phones and burners to make tracing nearly impossible. To lure the criminal in, Delcour and negotiator Farrell instruct Didier to take charge of the bargaining, prompting several intense scenes where Elbe portrays a father caught between the desire to give in to the kidnappers, and the obligation to follow orders that don t always seem reasonable.Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of 24 Days is how it depicts the strain involved when placing your trust, and your son s life, in the hands of officials whose methods are not necessarily foolproof nor always logical, even if they are meant to be experts in handling such situations. The push-and-pull between Didier, who follow --The Hollywood Reporter