“The Outreau Affair”, the truth, twenty years later

TéléObs.- How did you come up with the experimental narration of this sprawling story full of twists and turns?

Olivier Ayache-Vidal. The Outreau affair is specific in that it plunges us into a world of pretense, an ocean of lies and manipulation where it is difficult to disentangle the true from the false. For the director of fiction that I am, the challenge was to imagine an original device that makes understandable this extraordinary case both at the human and judicial level. I wanted to mix theatre, cinema and documentary. It was on my way to the low-rent housing estate of the Tour du Renard, in the midst of demolition, that the idea of ​​a journey through time and space came to me. It was necessary to tell not only the instruction but also the memories of the protagonists. The shooting studio was designed as the interior of a brain in which everyone enters as in their own memory. Everyone revisited their story through the different sets – the apartment of the Badaoui-Delay couple [respectivement condamnés en 2004 à 15 et 20 ans de prison pour viols sur mineurs, NDLR], the police station, the judge’s office, the prison cells… – and confronted his double, in this case, the actor who embodies him. A mise en abyme of which we had not revealed anything to preserve the spontaneity of their reaction. They were free to intervene as they pleased.

Isn’t there a risk for the viewer to get lost between fiction and reality?

OA-V.