Almost six years have passed since the night of November 13, 2015, when the terrorist attacks on the Bataclan and the Stade de France resulted in 131 victims and thousands of injured. The trial against the twenty surviving defendants opens on Wednesday 8 September. Among them, the 31-year-old Belgian of Moroccan origins Salah Abdeslam, the only survivor of the armed commando connected to the Islamic State group. The process is expected to take about nine months.
The proceeding will have to shed light on the shadow areas of that massacre: how it was possible that the capital of a country like France was held hostage, for hours, by a group of terrorists; where the intelligence services have failed, not only the French, which have failed to prevent the terrorists from traveling undisturbed between Belgium and Paris; what prevented, despite the tragic precedent of the massacre in the headquarters of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, a more rapid reaction of the security forces on the evening of the attacks.
The documentary by Francis Gillery made for the Franco-German network Arte (and available on Arte Italia with Italian subtitles) tries to shed light on the events of that night, thanks also to the testimonies of Manuel Valls and Bernard Cazeneuve, at the time prime minister and Minister of the Interior of France.
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