Laëtitia Perrais

was 18 years old and had a twin sister,

Jessica

, with whom she had lived a childhood marked by the violence of her biological father and his comings and goings between the family home, social services and foster homes.

Despite everything, he had managed to get ahead, he liked to watch TV, sing karaoke and talk with his friends on Facebook.

Until the night of January 18, 2011, she was raped, strangled and dismembered by the habitual criminal

Tony Meilhon.

A terrible tragedy that, like the cases of the girls of Alcásser or Diana Quer in our country, raised a huge media and political stir in France.

In 2016, the historian Ivan Jablonka published

Laëtitia or the end of men

(edited in Spain by Anagrama), a revealing and exhaustive essay with which he intended to do justice to the victim and denounce the structural problems of a sick society, in which misogyny, violence, and misery were a deadly combination.

Now comes to Filmin the mini-series based on the book, a heartbreaking puzzle reconstructed with a firm hand by

Jean-Xavier de Lestrade

, a pioneer of

true crime

thanks to

Un coupable idéal

(an Oscar-winning documentary in 2002) and

The Staircase

, which also is the person in charge of another series on a truncated adolescence,

The life of Manon

(available in Filmin).

"When a murder like this occurs, the interest of the media is usually focused on the circumstances of the crime itself, the most gruesome details of the investigation or the behavior of the murderer," explains the filmmaker via videoconference. "In this case

what interested me, like Jablonka, was the vital testimony of Jessica and Laetitia since they were born

. When you start to delve into these biographical details you discover a world marked by daily, repeated, unbearable violence. I wanted to describe that violent universe in which there is little room for hope or redemption. "

On this occasion, De Lestrade chose to resort to a series of fiction based on real events, instead of the usual resources of

true crime

, a genre of which he is concerned about its recent drift, "which seeks to exploit the sensationalist side of criminal stories ". Her goal here was to bring Laëtitia to life (played by

Marie Colomb

with disarming verisimilitude) and protect her sister Jessica and the rest of her family as much as possible.

"They are people on whom this tragedy has had a terrible impact. In addition, making a drama with actors and filming in a place other than the one where the events took place, I could tell that very specific story giving it a much more universal perspective. like a Greek tragedy. "

Aeschylus

,

Sophocles

or

Euripides

could be the creators of the unfortunate Laëtitia.

De Lestrade, who in her previous works had already repeatedly dealt with sexual violence, incest, social exclusion or the problems of the legal system, chooses here to offer a kaleidoscopic look that transcends the perspective of the protagonist.

In her meticulous reconstruction of the case, the impotence of the social worker, the frustration of the police inspector and the populist opportunism of Nicolas Sarkozy, the then president of the French Republic, also have a prominent place. "He used a double standard: he said that he felt close to the family and the victim, that he shared their grief, but at the same time he exploited his pain for his own benefit.

And that is disgusting

."

Their response to the crime was to advocate for tougher penalties and accuse the judges of not doing their job, to which they responded with a mobilization that paralyzed the courts of much of the country. "The only solution is not to extend the sentences," says De Lestrade. "We are talking about a story in which a guy, the father of the twins, assaults and rapes the mother of his daughters.

They send him to prison and, when he leaves, the system trusts the girls

, because the mother has such serious psychological consequences that she is unable to deal with them. It is also convenient to delve into the murderer's childhood, immersed in violence. That is the true origin of the crime, something that can only be solved if instead of building more prisons that money is used to better finance social services and the judicial system. "

The sensationalism of the press also does not escape the critical gaze of the filmmaker.

Like vultures in search of carrion, the media display their usual morbid exhibitionism.

"

They turn to the excessive violence of the murderer, the monstrous part of the criminal, without being interested in his personal history

, in what has made him someone capable of such a horrible event. All of this contributes to qualify this type of crime as something absurd, chaotic or senseless, but this murder cannot be dismissed as madness, but rather as

the most logical closure of a story that began with the birth of Tony Meilhon and Laëtitia

, two parallel trajectories that begin, intersect and explode. "The fuse of the bomb was lit long before that fateful January 18, 2011.

Laëtitia herself expressed on her Facebook wall the most accurate diagnosis possible about that female adolescence threatened and fractured by structural violence: "For all those who judge us without knowing how we are inside and everything we have experienced,

our fragility is more delicate of what you believe

. And that people do not see. "

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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