This documentary shows a few moments of the life of 14 real persons who have been caught red-handed by the police : mainly their meeting with the deputy public prosecutor (he/she can decide to send them right away or later to the court) but also with a lawyer. A snapshot of two systems : justice and criminalty in today’s France. —IMDb
Raymond Depardon is a photographer, a journalist and a filmmaker. He was born into a family of farmers in 1942 in Burgundy and went to Paris in 1958, wishing to be a photographer. He was first taken on as a messenger in an agency and was sent to take photos of an opening-night at the cinema: the movie was none other than Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. He finally established his own agency, Gamma, together with three reporters, in 1966 ‘not for money but for the freedom’. He suggested to set up a cinema department: ‘we bought an Eclair- camera and tried to make news-films for television in addition to taking news-photograhs… It was then that I learned to hold the camera." When Depardon films people, he is silent. If one has the impression that he always keeps his eyes lowered in the face of the world’s miseries, it is untrue. Raymond Depardon looks as through a lattice and reacts like quicksilver, keeping his deepest, innermost emotion secret, and allows his pictures to speak for themselves… read more