Documentary on police violence crowned twice at French film festival
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Loading... - Jake Martin
- 23 Feb 2022
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“The state claims the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force,” wrote German sociologist Max Weber at the end of the 19th century.
The Monopoly of Violence (Un pays qui se tient sage), by French director David Dufresne, explores this concept by asking police officers, sociologists, injured demonstrators, and victims' relatives to react and comment on various sequence of images sourced from amateur mobile phone footage.
Journalist, writer and director Dufresne has in the last few years also become the unofficial spokesman on the issue of police violence in France, a label which grew from his presence on Twitter and his slogan "Allo Place Beauvau" flagging up cases of police violence directly to the Interior Ministry.
He began putting together the elements of his film at the height of the Yellow Vest anti-government protests in 2018. The process of selecting raw footage from social media accounts and the internet was a long and fastidious job.
For Dufresne, it was important to bring these images to the big screen, larger than life, rather than have them remain stuck inside the tiny screens of televisions or even telephones, easily forgotten once the viewer has moved on.
He saw an opportunity to bring about a public debate on the role of police in society and whether there can be such a thing as “legitimate violence” - not just in France, but in any democracy.
"What I wanted to show is that being a police [officer] is not something one does naturally. The role of the police is not something set in stone, it is something than can be discussed," Dufresne told 20 Minutes newspaper in October 2020 when the film was released in French cinemas. Read More...
