To anyone familiar with the French film mini-genre known as “banlieu cinema,” the tragic terrorist attacks in Paris of a week ago would not have come as a surprise. For the past thirty years, French filmmakers have examined the growing powder keg of growing hopelessness in the housing projects of suburban France. We’ll talk with James Austin, associate professor of French and associate faculty member in the Film Studies program at Connecticut College. He writes extensively about the banlieu film genre in books and articles like “Destroying the Banlieu: Reconfigurations of Suburban Space in French Film.” (Photo: Flickr/Austin Beeman)