Laetitia

Origin and Year: France, 2020	Director: Jean-Xavier de Lestrade
Runnning time: 2 x 45 min

The first French series to get into the selection of the Sundance Film Festival was based on a four-year-old book by local historian Ivan Jablonka. He received the Prix Médicis literary award for his literary reconstruction of the actual case of the murder of an 18-year-old girl that the whole country learned about. The series and the book begin with finding the girl’s motorcycle. He gets a detailed description of her last hours after showing how the police and the authorities, including then-president Sarkozy, approached the case. The latter tried to benefit political points by criticizing the work of local self-government authorities. The case has sparked a debate in France on recidivism, but Jablonka’s book focuses mainly on the problem of violence against women. The series which accurately copies the book thus reveals in flashbacks even how Laetitia and her sister were treated by social services and their foster parents, and to what physical and symbolic violence the girls were exposed to in life. The director of the title, which reacts to the worldwide popularity of the true crime genre, is Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, the Academy award (Oscar) winner for the documentary Murder on a Sunday Morning.