It’s a luminous film by Alsatian director Claudia Marschal. Although dealing with a sexual assault by a Sundgau priest on Emmanuel, a 13-year-old child in 1993, The Deposition takes its viewers on a story of redemption and reconciliation with powerful messages about the benefits of listening and speaking. Alternating shots filmed by Emmanuel, images taken in Super 8 at the time and refined current sequences, the film manages to detach itself from the news story, without ever attenuating it, while relying on the hearing of Emmanuel at the gendarmerie. Scheduled in cinemas on Wednesday October 23, it will be shown in preview at Cosmos in Strasbourg on Thursday October 17 at 8 p.m. as part of the Eastern Film Festival and at Bel Air in Mulhouse on Friday October 18 at 8 p.m.
Rue89 Strasbourg: How did you come into contact with the story of Emmanuel?
Claudia Marschal: Emmanuel is my cousin and I always knew him to be very religious, he went to church all the time. It intrigued me and I had discussed for a long time the idea of making a film with him on the place of this powerful and omnipresent faith in his life. We had barely started when he received a letter from the priest, which brought home this attack of which he was the victim as a child more than thirty years ago. For the film, I suggested that he film himself and that’s what he did as he embarked on a quest for justice for what he suffered. He is the one who embedded the documentary in his personal story and it is relevant in the end. It prevents it from being recovered and that suited me very well.
How were you able to participate in an interview with a victim of sexual assault at the gendarmerie?
It was Emmanuel who recorded the sound of the hearing, without the knowledge of the gendarmerie adjutant. And with the film team, when we heard the strength of this testimony, we immediately understood that it would be the strongest element of the film. But we didn’t have an image, so we suggested to the gendarmerie that they do the audition again, to stage it. The gendarmerie refused, citing legal reasons. We were only able to shoot a few images and even then, we had to modify the adjutant’s face using artificial intelligence and never pronounce his name. Which is a shame because the work of the adjutant in collecting the words of a victim of sexual violence is exemplary, especially in the face of Emmanuel who almost regrets at that moment having launched himself against the priest, fearing that his story would be poorly received by the police. Regardless, it’s the phone recording of the original audition that serves as the basis for the film, and that’s fine in the end.
Another strong point of the film are the videos from the family archives. An unexpected material! Where did these images come from and how did you gain access to them?
So we were lucky, because the mayor of Courtavon at the time was a video enthusiast and systematically filmed all the family celebrations that took place in the village, weddings, communions, etc. He had given the reels to Emmanuel’s father who passed them on to me. And these images of Emmanuel as a child and his family are indeed exceptional. With their grain, their colors, they say something about that time, they bring back childhood memories almost as if they were extracted from Emmanuel’s memory… Without them, I’m not sure we could have done the movie. Some of these images, notably the interior shots of the period, come from my own collections of Super 8 reels; I created my own little personal collection of archive images according to my discoveries.
And then there is the story within the story, the reunion with Emmanuel’s father, was that anticipated?
I knew that Emmanuel had started to get closer to his father. But I had not imagined that he would be so involved, as in the scene where he listens to his son’s testimony to the bishop of Strasbourg, Mgr Ravel. For these sequences, the decision was to use a discreet camera, fixed shots which show the protagonists in their direct environments. There is also the relationship to the faith of Emmanuel, who leaves and returns to Catholicism. In the end, there are in this film all the aspects that I initially thought about telling, intertwined by this testimony.
