How to make a report that shows visibly massacred civilians, without falling into macabre voyeurism while retaining the strength of the testimony?
What should be put in the image, what should be “blurred”? It is the difficult balance that the two reporters from France Télévisions had to find, to testify to what they saw in Boutcha.
Arnaud Comte immediately understands that these terrible images will have historical significance and that they will mark a turning point in the course of the war in Ukraine. Stéphane Guillemot films the intimate details of the victims, but with great modesty and respect for their memory. Arnaud Comte writes a sober comment, without saying that the Russian soldiers are at the origin of this massacre even if, today, for the great reporter, “there is no doubt”.
What marked the journalist a lot is that the dead he discovers are “people who look like us. They could have been my neighbour, my grandfather or my grandmother”.
In the bag of one of Boutcha’s victims, there was “a tin can, a chocolate bar and a phone charger”, says Arnaud Comte. The old man was probably out to run some errands when death mowed him down. On his bike.
Scenes of extreme violence, which the great reporter, back in France, is now trying, not to forget – he knows it’s impossible – but to “cover up” other images, beautiful images those -the.
“At the info counter” is the first native (audio) podcast of France Télévisions. In the form of a journalistic interview, an actor who produces public service television news — a major reporter, a cameraman, a presenter — comes to give himself up, tell, reveal the way he works. In a sound atmosphere of a coffee counter, he confides his doubts, his joys, but also his fears when he is on the ground or in the studio. Since May 2021, the podcast “At the info counter” has also received journalists from Radio France (France Inter, France Info, France Culture) at its microphone.
The series is produced by François Beaudonnet, columnist for franceinfo (channel 27), senior reporter for France 2 and columnist for the program “Nous, les Européens” on France 3. A former correspondent in Rome and Brussels, he started out on the radio where he presented the 1 p.m. news on France Inter.
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This episode was directed by Timothée Le Hec.