Can we make a series on an intervention of the French army still in progress? This is the challenge taken up by Sentinels, which tells the story of soldiers tracking down terrorists in Mali for Operation Barkhane. “We wanted a series as current as possible“, explains Thibault Valetoux, creator and screenwriter with Frédéric Krivine of Sentinels (seven episodes), visible from April 5 on OCS.
If the Russian invasion in Ukraine has pushed the conflict in Mali into the background, it is nonetheless at the heart of the news. The French withdrawal from this country, announced on February 17 by President Emmanuel Macron, should last several more months and it is in this area that the only French hostage held abroad, the journalist Olivier Dubois, is.
During filming, the crew of Sentinels benefited from the advice of the army. “We spent a week immersed in a barracks in Orléans“, says the actress Pauline Parigot, who plays Lieutenant Anaïs Collet and gives the reply in particular to Louis Peres, noticed recently in the series Germinal. Equipment and military uniforms were also provided to the actors. Unlike the United States, where many series have been shot on ongoing conflicts, such as Homeland while the USA was still in Afghanistan, France has so far practiced little exercise.
“Inspired by a certain American practice which is not afraid to document reality for the general public, the Ministry of Defense has obviously decided to change its communication“, analyzes Thibaut de Saint Maurice, researcher at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University.
This is confirmed by Eve-Lise Blanc-Deleuze, head of the Cinema and Creative Industries Mission of the Ministry of the Armed Forces: “The general public knows the police, the gendarmerie, but very little about the military world and defense issues, because there are very few films and series about our universe“.”There is a real knowledge gap that we need to fill.“, she adds, and “fiction can be a tool“.
Sentinels is not, however, an advertising spot intended to arouse vocations. “This is neither an antimilitarist series, nor a propaganda series“, valued Thibault Valetoux. “The desire was to make a series on youth and commitment. However, the ranks of the army are made up of young people who commit“, he argues. It was about “understand what is hidden behind the uniform(…) to seek the specificity of each as a human being“.
The series tackles taboo subjects in the French army: a soldier takes drugs, a blunder is committed after an ambush… It remains an institution where you don’t want to take the risk of hitting, unlike the police. , finds Thibault Valetoux. According to him, “detective series with neurotic cops, we’ve seen them for years, we don’t fear the crime of lèse-majesté. When we talk about the army, we’re walking on eggshells“.
The soldiers of Sentinels are also representative of the highly diversified recruitment of the French army. Alongside a female lieutenant – which a priori is not impossible since the infantry has female officers in its ranks, even if there are hardly any in the combat sections – there is a black and Muslim corporal, Martial Mendy, played by Birane Ba, the son of an eminent white general, Julien Ravalet (Louis Peres), and a Muslim soldier of North African origin Saadi Djibril (Samy Seghir).
As Frédéric Krivine remarks, “the French army has almost always been much more multicultural than other sectors of society“.”It was not a particular political concern on our part to highlight this diversity“, adds the creator of the historical saga A French village. Sentinels is not based on a true story. “Reality only interests us so as not to be out of step with what we are saying, but we don’t do reality: we do human comedy“, he warns.