The channel broadcasts a moving unit by Éric Métayer inspired by a true story. With Cécile Bois, awarded for her role at the La Rochelle festival, and Odile Vuillemin.
Ten years. This is how long it will take Laurence Jambu to save his niece Karine from the mistreatment inflicted by her own parents. Ten years of fierce combat, reports to social services in letters to the public prosecutor's office, summons by the police to be taken into custody for slanderous denunciations.
This true story was the subject of a book, Reports, written by both women. Éric Métayer, co-director of Tickling with Andréa Bescond, and whose visceral commitment against sexual violence is known, took hold of it with the modesty that characterizes him. “The work is hard, even sordid, we must bring this reality to the screen while ensuring that it is still admissible, he analyzes. In any case, I am not here to show the violence but to make it felt, the imagination is twice as strong.»
Mood swings
The little girl, mute, with her big black eyes (Flavie Dachy) suffers the mood swings of a depressed mother, with a cadaverous pallor, alternating alcohol and medication, bursts of rock and roll life quickly crushed by a terrible liability. “As an acting challenge, it can be a priori enjoyable to seek out this type of character, very difficult, admits Odile Vuillemin, her interpreter. It seems so naturally caricatured that the instinct is to go in the direction of histrionics. But the more Eric brought us back to sincerity, the more disturbing it became to play.»
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Cécile Bois, awarded at the La Rochelle fiction festival for this role, embodies Laurence Jambu in all her light, her gentleness, her pugnacity, her anger too. “Eric, who met her, gave me keys that helped me build the character. Occasionally, I asked how she experienced this scene. If he didn't have the answer, he was going to find it. It is obviously always delicate to play existing people, it implies a responsibility. I tried to be as true to who she is, how she reacted to things. Concerning the scene where Karine is taken away from her and placed in a foster home, she told me she screamed. But I ultimately did something more sober, which better serves the situation on screen.»
“The word is free, we must now act at the level of social services and justice”
Eric Métayer
What message would Éric Métayer like to convey? “Tickles was dedicated to the victim. Here the entire judicial system is at stake. For ten years, we have been calling for freedom of speech, now that it is free, we must act at the level of social services and justice», insists the filmmaker, who wishes to point out that every week a child dies at the hands of his parents in France.
The fiction is thus programmed as part of a continuous evening around the International Day of the Rights of the Child. It will be followed by a debate “How to protect children in danger?” presented by Carole Gaessler, in the presence of Karine and Laurence Brunet-Jambu, then the rebroadcast of the documentary Incest, saying it and hearing it d’Andrea Rawlins-Gaston.
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