L' ordre et la morale

Most people would have a very hard time finding New Caledonia on a map, let alone know who rules there. One has to look at the other side of the earth, as the archipelago lies in the South-West Pacific, relatively close to the coast of Australia. This makes New Caledonia, at a distance of some 16,000 kilometres from France, just about its furthest colonial possession. 
When the FLNKS (Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste), an armed Melanesian socialist separatist organization made up mainly of Kanaks (New Caledonia’s original inhabitants), took some 30 people hostage on 22 April 1988, the far-away capital retaliated – with extreme prejudice. Opération Victor, a joint commando operation involving SWAT teams from four different branches of the French armed forces and police, ended in a bloodbath. Actor/director Mathieu Kassovitz uses this rather sordid foreign politics disaster for a scathing comment on how France has dealt with the last remnants of its erstwhile colonial empire.