“Police violence, the struggle of families”: this documentary tells the struggle of the relatives of the victims

It’s a subject he knows well. Inès has been working on the topic of police violence since 2016. He remembers Theo Affair, this young man brutally injured in the rectal area by a telescopic baton during a police check in Aulnay-sous-Bois. Sadly, this story is also that of a click: the journalist then begins a long archival work, that of documenting the struggle of the families of the victims, the list of which gets longer from year to year. Through her pen and his gaze, she tells of their struggle to know (and sometimes make known) the truth, but also to obtain justice.

Interview with Inès Belgacem, director of The violence of the police, the struggle of families.

To miss. What did you want to show in this documentary?

Ines Belgacem. I wanted to give families a voice with little to no media coverage. Make their stories more visible. We tend to deal with these events as they happen. They are classified under the heading “miscellaneous facts” and then fall into oblivion. Sometimes, some twists in the investigation bring them back to center stage… But we know nothing about the middle ground, this constant struggle to get answers, this gnawing uncertainty… I wanted to show this everyday life.

Can you identify several points of similarity between these families…

Indeed. Despite the diversity of their histories, these families share many things in common. The first is the amazement felt: we don’t understand how those who care about trust anyway, whose role is to protect, can be a danger to those close to us. Then there is the desire to understand what happened and the difficulty in obtaining information. Many of these families discover the facts in a violent way, through a press release, or in the press, where their loved ones are criminalized. The reflex is to look for testimony, evidence in the face of the silence of the authorities. Finally, in these cases the procedural times are very long. This wait is unbearable, families fear a dismissal, debates on the notion of legitimate or illegitimate violence…

How did you make this documentary?

For me it was essential to provide researched work, well-sourced, fed with archive images, video taken by witnesses, media excerpts… I also wanted to include testimonies from police officers, prosecutors, to leave the possibility for viewers to form your own opinion. This required a year of pre-investigation, to fully understand each case in all its complexity, the emotional burden it represents for the families of the victims to tell their story.