Mali, two years ago. French soldiers from the Barkhane force sent by the government of François Hollande to fight against jihadism and track down terrorists. They are under the leadership of a female lieutenant. But a dramatic blunder rekindles tensions within the population.
It’s about Sentinelsthe new series by Frédéric Krivine, the author of A French village, and imagined by Thibault Valetoux. seven episodes available from Tuesday on the OCS platform. For Frédéric Krivine, this is not a series of war. “It’s a series about war. The promise of the series is not to see people fighting and risking death. It is to explain why a community of rather generous people find themselves in a situation where they cannot accomplish their goals. And we found this kind of paradox that led to what we made: how do these soldiers, who came to do good, because most of them are humanists, manage to do something that is useless. “
The series is produced by Jean Philippe Amar, already at work in A French village. Sentinels is a political series, but also beautiful portraits of French youth under the flag. Birane Ba of the Comédie Française embodies the non-commissioned officer Martial Mendy, manhandled by the officer Julien Ravalet, embodied by the revelation of the year in GerminalLouis Peres.
Louis Peres remembers filming in scorching heat in Morocco: “First we went to a barracks. We went into total immersion with the soldiers, we were able to soak up their experience, their feelings. Then we learn to handle weapons, to shoot, to walk because the posture of the soldier is very different from what we imagine. In American films, we see these guys running around, it explodes. But in fact this is not the reality. These are people who spend a lot of time waiting, who are constantly on the alert but who must be released to try to make as few mistakes as possible. They are soldiers, but above all they are people. We focused the series on that, on what was under the uniform”.
Sentinels, a series written two years ago. Since then, the French state has decided to withdraw this intervention force from Mali. A realistic, political series, to be discovered on the OCS platform from Tuesday.