Directors Anne Hirsch and Arnaud Mansir approach the delicate subject of infant abuse through the route of Alexander, accused of having mortally shook his newborn. The judicial hell told at a man height.
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In recent years, scientific controversy is growing around the shaken baby’s syndrome. In France in particular, doctors and researchers deplore that the diagnosis of this particular form of abuse is worn too systematically before certain brain damage in an infant, without looking for other possible causes.
To tackle this difficult, delicate, because affecting childhood protection, and very complex as soon as we enter the medical discussion, directors Anne Hirsch and Arnaud Mansir chose a story with a man height. . A man height or rather family, that of Alexandre Chacon and his companion, Yoanna.
The few words on the screen, in the preamble of this documentary of fifty-two minutes broadcast as part of the broadcast “France in real”, give the tone: “the intention of this film is not not to deny the reality of the abuse of which hundreds of children are victims every year. She is to wonder about a significant margin of error that condemns the number of already proven families. “
Sentence existence
For Alexandre and Yoanna, the tests and the judicial hell began almost ten years ago. Accused of killing his baby, Eitan, in 2013, shaking him, which he has always denied, Alexander was judged by the Assize Court of Paris in 2019, and acquitted. A few days later, the floor appealed.
The camera of Anne Hirsch and Arnaud Mansir immersed in family intimacy during the months preceding the second trial. We discover the “double life” of the couple Chacon: on the one hand, the ordinary and happy daily life of a family with two little girls (born after the death of the first baby); on the other, a suspended existence, pending this new test.
With his lawyer, Grégoire Cartillate, who has defended him since the first moments, and scientists who help them to refine the technical aspects of the file, Alexander prepares there carefully and with determination. Invested in Adikia, an association of families accruedly accused of abuse, Alexander and Yoanna also exchange with other relatives, who tell little or prou the same story as the one they experienced.
How to face a second assize trial, where we risk years of prison, while continuing to live normally with his children? What to say with two girls of this big brother who is no longer and a judicial course that does not end? How to convince the jurors of his innocence, when some experts do not leave room for doubt or a balanced scientific discussion?
Next step by step the course of Alexandre Chacon and Yoanna, to the court of Melun (Seine-et-Marne) where the call takes place, Anne Hirsch and Arnaud Mansir bring, with great sensitivity, Some elements of answer to these vertiginous questions. His fight, he says he did not have chosen, Alexander decided to lead him to the end. For his own, and for other families who have seen, too, the soil collapse under their feet.