Outreau, autopsie d'un désastre
Jacques Renard
2006 - 104 min - Beta digital - Couleur - France

One dead and 13 acquitted out of 17 defendants who accumulated 26 years of preventive detention, broken families, ruined careers, destabilized children, vanished parents. Yet throughout these five years, the declarations of the “Outreau Thirteen” never varied one iota. The same line of defense, the same resistance, the same innocence. They had to wait and suffer for five years before being cleared. How and why did they come to this? Used filmed archives of the parliamentary commission and footage of the facts themselves, and the testimonies of key figures, the film objectively and carefully analyzes the “mechanisms” of this miscarriage of justice and what it tells us about our society, our legal system, the social and media context of the moment, and human nature itself.