French filmmaker Thierry de Peretti presented his film Enquète sur un scandale d’état/Undercover yesterday in the Official Selection. It is set in 2015 and deals with the scandal created by revelations that an investigative journalist receives about the French State’s involvement in drug trafficking, which lead him into the darkest corners of the French Republic. The filmmaker explained to the press that he was interested in showing how journalist research is carried out and how a news story like this is created, how a journalist works with his sources and how a scandal is manufactured. He also pointed out that what he was interested in from a cinematic perspective were the real people that this story revolves around. “Everything that appears in the film is true, everything they say was actually said although I don’t know if everything that was said is true.”

Vincent Lindon, who plays a high-ranking police officer at the heart of the scandal, said that he felt that recently he found it really difficult to tell the difference between heroes and villains. “I think there may be heroes that do wicked things and villains that do good things. I like complex characters that think and make you think.”