When he started working on Goliath10 years ago, the filmmaker Frédéric Tellier did not think that the subject of his film would still be relevant when it was released.
Yet this environmental thriller, which focuses on the carcinogenic effects of pesticides on the health of those exposed to them, might as well have been shot today.
“I have always dealt, somewhat by chance, with true stories and real facts,” explains the filmmaker. The first thing that excites me is the fight of small people against superpowers. »
In writing Goliath, he invented the three main characters, and he even invented the name of the pesticide substance, tetrazine, involved in cancers of the lymphatic system diagnosed in exposed people. He also imagined this scene where a grieving woman sets herself on fire in front of the headquarters of the multinational agrochemicals company that she considers responsible for the death of her spouse.
But the numbers, he says, he took as gleaned from his long years of research. In an interview, he also points out that, as is the case in the film, reports of grouped cases of babies born with disabilities, in specific regions of France, have been destroyed. He also talks about Paul François, this farmer who ended up winning in court against the multinational Monsanto because of the deficient labeling of the herbicide Lasso, which cost him his health. Mr. François, who has still not received a penny from the multinational, recently gave an interview to the Homework on the subject. Frédéric Tellier also speaks of these industrialists who have had streams erased from the maps so that they no longer have to account for the pesticides they carry there. It is downright privatization of the living that is at stake, as one of the characters in the film says.
A frightening end
“It’s probably the most frightening end,” says Frédéric Tellier about the privatization of nature. “Nature does not belong to anyone. And there are people who say to themselves “we will make it private, and we will trade with it”. »
All is not lost, however. Quite recently, in Quebec, an agricultural worker, Armando Lazo Bautista, succeeded in having the court recognize that his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma was linked to his exposure to pesticides.
But the most difficult thing is to establish beyond any doubt the causal link between a product and its effects on health. “I tried to make a current film, not to dramatize the subject, not to make it ugly and not to embellish it. I took the time to check the sources and the figures”, he says, adding that he did not want to make a “partisan” film.
Still, the Goliath of the film is obviously not the small farmers or the neighbors of farmers who try to demonstrate the effects of tetrazine on their health. It is indeed the biochemical multinational, and its chief lobbyist who bends the Ministers of Agriculture to his will while buying the silence of the victims.
“The strength of the environmental thriller is precisely to put faces, feelings on technical data. This is what makes the power of cinema. He depicts characters with their joys and sorrows. »
The filmmaker himself says he was transformed by the years of research that led to the making of Goliath. This has changed, he says, his relationship to the living. “It has profoundly changed my life,” he concludes.