Drugs in Lausanne: Fernand Melgar was right

There is no point in being right before everyone else, everyone knows the assertion. And Fernand Melgar, documentary filmmaker now retired from this “cinema environment”, somewhere in the forest, preferring the company of a horsefrom birds and bees to that of men, probably doesn’t care at all. But hey, there you go, Melgar, he was absolutely right, in 2018, when he looked at and photographed the reality below his home, in the Maupas district, Lausanne, and he noticed the rising tide of drug dealersinexorable, insolently left near people and children by absent authorities, lying to themselves, locked in their biases.

Therefore, sadness appears today. Because it is a tragic farce to listen, six years later, to the municipalities of three Vaud towns led by various lefts (Vevey, Lausanne, Yverdon-les-Bains) coming to whine, calling on the canton and the country Helpadmitting a situation that had become “out of control”.

Pardon? But whose control, we dare ask you? There are no worse blind people than those who do not want to see, everyone knows the assertion equally. But it is false, there is worse: the said municipalities which, stuck in their complacent idea of ​​themselves, have allowed the situation to deteriorate year after year. And their responsibility is today treated in a bad way: by trying to dilute it as much as possible.

Let’s be precise: I absolutely do not intend to call into question here the so-called four pillars strategy, a clearly intelligent approach in an apprehension ranging from prevention to health, from security to repression. But like a chair, it’s all about balance. The latter, in the canton of Vaud more than elsewhere, is shaky. The dealers, illegal or not, from immigrant backgrounds or not, victims of evil networks if it reassures you to believe it, lived around here a period that we would happily describe as paradise, if the latter were not so dangerously artificial.

Fernand Melgar was right. And if the song of a tit interests her today more than the melody of the time, the bad song of reproaches had affected her then, dropped as it was by her supposed political friends (which always sounds like an oxymoron) and a French-speaking cinema community which united against him.

So yes, the documentary filmmaker Melgar was a touchy, touchy filmmaker, who searched for a truth in our country sometimes by groping, by choosing his angles. But he wanted this truth, at least its fragments, and often showed us people and words that we neither wanted to see nor hear. His detractors preferred fiction, it is so much more convenient and comfortable. Here’s the sadness: I miss Melgar’s cinema.

Christophe Passerborn in Fribourg, has worked at Le Matin Dimanche since 2014, after having worked in particular at Le Nouveau Quotidien and L’Illustré. More info

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