Guilty

Guilty (Présumé coupable, 2011) is a French courtroom drama by Vincent Garenq, available to watch online on iFILM. It reconstructs the ordeal of bailiff Alain Marécaux, dragged from his home one autumn morning in 2001.

The accusation is monstrous and the evidence is nowhere, yet the magistrate has already made up his mind. What follows is twenty-three months behind bars, a marriage in pieces, children taken away, and a hunger strike as the last way to be heard. Philippe Torreton plays a man stripped, slowly, of his name, his job and any faith that the courts might listen.

Behind the story sits one of France's worst miscarriages of justice — thirteen people jailed on a lie, cleared only in late 2005, in a scandal that shook the country's legal system to its foundations. Garenq shoots it dry, almost like a case file, which makes it land harder. This one is for viewers who can stomach watching an investigator's error crush real lives. Stream Guilty (2011) online on iFILM.