Paris (AFP)

"What brings us together is sobriety", says the writer Ivan Jablonka about the director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, who has adapted for television his investigation "Laëtitia ou la fin des hommes", on the chilling murder of the young Laëtitia Perrais in 2011.

The mini-series event will be broadcast from Monday evening on France 2 and put online this weekend on France.TV.

"I wanted to talk about Laëtitia's life. Not the corpse cut into pieces, but this young woman who had sorrows, joys, boyfriends; who went through hardships but who had her share of happiness ", underlined the author and historian to AFP just a year ago at the La Rochelle fiction festival.

"I was sure that Jean-Xavier would respect the spirit of my book and behind, human beings: a dad, a mom, a sister, uncles, aunts", adds Ivan Jablonka, whose work, Prix Médicis 2016, had approached this news item as an object of history, social and sensitive.

In six episodes, Jean-Xavier de Lestrade films the life of Laëtitia Perrais (played by Marie Colomb), placed very young with her twin sister Jessica (Sophie Breyer) in a home and then in a foster family, and the investigation that followed his assassination by a thirtysomething battered childhood, Tony Meilhon, near Pornic in 2011.

- "Two young girls" -

The director and documentary filmmaker had already worked on intimacy and violence.

When a producer proposed the project to him, he first thought "that it would be wise for all of us, members of the audiovisual industry, to leave that aside. The book has such strength that we will never do so. good".

"But this story had to be given the opportunity to be seen and felt by an audience larger than that of the readers of the book," explains the director.

"If we stop at his atrocious death, that has no interest. But if we dig (...) there is a world behind, laid bare, a world of ordinary violence, a world that appears very little . In the middle there are two young girls who are trying to heal their wounds ".

In the summer of 2011, Jessica revealed the rape and repeated touching imposed by the father of her foster family.

The latter, who had arrogated to the media on several occasions the role of defender of sex offenders, will be sentenced to eight years' imprisonment for rape or sexual assault on five young victims.

For "Laëtitia", Ivan Jablonka rejects the term "news item", and prefers to speak of "the itinerary of a young woman which ends in a tragic way, good or bad encounters, a certain state of society".

- "Respect Laëtitia" -

During the three months of filming, "Laëtitia's death happened to us all the time", says Jean-Xavier de Lestrade.

"There is not a single day when a member of the team did not cry. Some people told me things that had happened to them, stories of violence."

In both works, the murder scene is not shown.

"It's useless," says the director.

"But there are violent scenes when the father hangs his baby on the balcony, or when he rapes the mother. If we really want to respect Laëtitia, we have to tell, show these things".

"At no time does the book allow itself to judge anyone, starting with the arrested criminal, Tony Meilhon. He committed a terrible act, but if we draw on his childhood, it is the same suffering, the same traumas" , underlines the director.

© 2020 AFP