Given my fascination with the film The Battle of Algiers, I couldn't let the world premiere of a film about a major episode in the France-Algeria conflict go unwatched, could I?

So I went to see Oct. 17, 1961 at the Toronto International Film Festival.

In some ways, because it's a historical drama about a horrible event in French history -- on the date in question, Algerians in Paris marched in support of their homeland's independence; the march was brutally crushed by police -- you know going in what's basically going to happen.

What's needed to make it interesting, therefore, are strong characters, good writing and fine direction to turn a 44-year-old event into compelling cinema for contemporary audiences.

To a large extent, I think director Alain Tasma succeeded.

Bookended by racist, bullying Paris cops and cold-eyed, psychopathic FLN hard men are ordinary Algerian immigrants and decent French people (including the police) who despair of the excesses of the extremes.

Events -- such as the FLN's assassinations of police officers, part of its vow to take the fight to French soil -- make the march, and the violent response to it, inevitable.

Two characters who show the middle ground are Abde, a young Algerian man who lives with his uncle Tarek, and his compassionate schoolteacher/chaste love interest (Marie-Helene? Sorry, didn't take notes -- I was there as a civilian :) ).

She goes with him to a police station to report his missing uncle (murdered by a police death squad) and runs into some truly repellent police officers, getting insulted and even slapped while she's there.

As they part outside the police station, he told her he'd basically given up on the idea of becoming a Frenchman.

Abde, who worked in a wrought iron shop, came into work one day earlier in the film sporting the marks of another police encounter. His boss, a fighter in the French resistance in the Second World War, wrote a letter to the police asking if they wanted to push all Algerians in Paris into the arms of the FLN.

He later marches -- and is shot by a panicky cop.

His shooting is captured on film by a journalist, Sabine, but her boss refused to run the footage, saying it would be better for the historical archives.

When she tries to screen it on her own for other journalists, unidentified men grab the footage. "Fascists," she spits.

There may be some actual historical basis to those sequences. Tasma said after the screening there is very little archival footage of the time available. One Belgian TV crew had its footage seized by the French government. Only about 15 photos exist of that night, he said.

Research for the film was done through interviews and archival research, he said.

In the Q-and-A afterward, I managed to fit in a question about whether Gillo Pontecorvo's film influenced him at all and whether he was interested in making a film about contemporary France or Europe and the divide between traditional Europeans and the new Muslim immigrants.

As to the first, Tasma said 'Battle' really didn't influence this particular movie, although he was flattered I would put his film in the same breath as Pontecorvo's.

For the second, he said he was more interested in exploring some of these more historical stories, noting that the French government has never apologized for what happened that day, something that still rankles the French Algerian community.

According to a Wikipedia article about Maurice Papon, police chief of Paris in 1961 but later convicted of being a Nazi collaborator, a French government commission claimed in 1998 only 40 died. Others claim 400 did. However, the Wikipedia article said there is a rough consensus that 200 people died that night.

The specific number really doesn't matter: Unresolved injustices have a way of rankling and lingering -- not to mention radicalizing some.

Exploring a nation's past is important, especially ignored injustices, but so is the artistic examination of contemporary issues.

A thread running through Battle and Oct. 17 are the fundamentally racist views of the majority of French characters, particularly in the police or military, towards North Africans.

While those films were set in the 1950s and early 1960s respectively, has much changed? Are the Abdes of today closer to being fully accepted members of French society?

Here's an excerpt from a Saturday Globe and Mail story:

French scholars of Islamic society now argue that radical Islam, which began as an export from the Middle East and Africa, is now an entirely European product, utterly devoid of links with actual Muslim countries.

"There is a kind of pan-European underclass that has formed, of young Muslim European citizens who have no real links with either European society or any real Muslim societies," said Farhad Khosrokhavar, a professor at Paris's School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences who has recently compiled his field work in Muslim extremist communities in a book titled The New Martyrs of Allah.

"Across Europe, there are similar patterns of this exclusion -- in France in these cites [housing projects], in England in poor inner cities. They feel that this exclusion is not really economic, but cultural."

I think Tasma and other French filmmakers would be doing their country a failure by examining this notion of exclusion.

As to the Pontecorvo comparison ...

I may have mentioned the two films in the same breath, but frankly, one's a masterpiece and one is not.

The Battle was more beautifully shot and more skilfully directed. The writing is also far above that in Oct. 17.

People a thousand years from now will be able to watch Battle and find some truths in it that applies to their era. People, if they watch Oct. 17, will see a capable treatment of the subject matter, but they won't be provoked to think in the way that a viewer of Battle will be.