MADE IN FRANCE – AU SERVICE DE LA GUERRE
52 minutes, 2020
Director : Sophie NIVELLE-CARDINALE (France) and Alice ODIOT (France)
Production : Les Films du Tambour de Soie (France), Bonne Pioche Télévision (France), Arte (Germany, France), Stenola Productions (Belgium), RTBF (Belgium)
With the participation of Public Sénat (France)
In coproduction avec Shelter Prod (Belgium)
On July 17th 2014, during Operation Protective Edge, an Israeli drone targeted a house in a working-class district of Gaza. Three children playing on the roof, Wassim, Afnan and Jihad, were killed, their bodies riddled with shrapnel from a missile. Commissioned by the NGO Al Mezan to collect evidence of war crimes committed during the offensive, Palestinian investigator Yamin al-Madhoun found a small piece of metal among the debris. On it is written “Paris, France” plus the name of a French company.
For the first time a legal link could be established between a war crime and a French industrialist. The exhibit allows the parents of the dead children to start proceedings against a manufacturer of war material.
As an experienced reporter, Sophie NIVELLE-CARDINALE has been covering conflicts in the Middle East for several years. In 2011 she was one of the first journalists to enter Syria illegally. Her reporting showed the incredible brutality of the Syrian regime’s repression. Her work has won the Bayeux War Correspondents Award (2013), the Albert Londres Award and the SCAM Stars (2016). In 2017 hers was the first foreign television crew to enter Raqqa with the Kurdish forces who took back the city from the Islamic State (“La Bataille de l’Euphrate”, Arte 2017). She continues to produce news reports and documentaries about the conflicts in the Middle East today.
Alice ODIOT is a French journalist and director born in 1976. She won the Albert Londres Award in 2012 for her film “Zambia, who profits from copper”. Her films explore the world of work, the excesses of capitalism and the prison environment. Among her documentaries: “Jusqu’à ce que la mort nous sépare” (2015), “Le mauvais œil” (2015) and “Des hommes” (2019, co-directed with Jean-Robert Viallet).