It took 36 years for this drama to be brought to the screen. Series Oussekine will be available tomorrow on the Disney+ platform.
She returns to the police blunder which led to the death of a young man of 22 years in 1986. His name was Malik, was a student and came out of a jazz concert in Paris this evening of December 5. He never took part in the demonstrations against the reform of the universities which took place throughout France. Yet this is what the police believed who beat him to death in a building hall.
The creator of the fiction, Antoine Chevrollier, was 4 years old at the time of the facts. It was nine years later that he learned what had happened to Malik Oussekine: “I discovered this story through a piece of rap by the group Assassin in 1995. One piece was called ‘L’Etat assassine’ and the chorus went ‘L’Etat assassine, an example: Malik Oussekine’. I was about ten years old and his name has remained engraved forever.
It is from the point of view of the family that he chose to tell the tragedy, how his mother, his brothers and sisters experienced this tragedy.
“We wanted to show this pain, this pain. To be closer. And then to widen the prism to see the big story inside this little one.”
Antoine Chevrollieron franceinfo
In the series, everything is real, these are only established facts. Antoine Chevrollier was nourished by the confidences of the Oussekine family: “I got in touch with Ben Amar and Mohamed, Malik’s older brothers. We spent a lot of time together. Every Sunday, for several months, I went to Meudon and we met for hours. A kind of trust was built between us. And they very generously gave me access to anecdotes, they told me who Malik was.”
The director also met the protagonists of the time, from Georges Kiejman (the Oussekine lawyer) to the resuscitator doctor, passing by the police officers who gravitated in the entourage of the platoon of motorized acrobats which included the murderers of the student. The latter were sentenced to suspended prison sentences, which had provoked the distress and anger of the Oussekines. “I think they are calmed down now with the series”concludes Antoine Chevrollier, to whom we also owe several episodes of Legends Office and of Black Baron.