During promotional stays in Russia, Jérôme Salle was struck by the violence of Russian society. What he felt pushed him to read, to take an interest in this country. And when he heard about this true story happened to a french victim of a kompromat, he saw the opportunity towrite a political thriller.
A thriller because the story of the film tells that of a man, Mathieu Roussel. Arrested and imprisoned in front of his daughter, this French expatriate is victim of a “kompromat”, a conventional weapon in Russia which consists in compromising by trumped up accusations, often terrible, the person one wishes to get rid of. Threatened with a life prison sentence, he is left with only one option: escape and reach France on its own…
And political because Jérôme Salle takes the opportunity to evoke the gap that exists between two opposing views of the world. Today with the war in Ukrainethe director even has the feeling that the current context has totally caught up with this fiction on which he nevertheless started working almost 4 years ago…