What can the French army do against Islamic terrorism in Mali? Screened in preview at the Series Mania Festival, the new series of OCS, Sentinels, broadcast this Tuesday at 8:40 p.m. on OCS Max, takes us to the Mopti region in Mali within a section of young soldiers deployed as part of Operation Barkhane. The 7 episodes of this series, created by Thibault Valetoux (Totems) and Frédéric Krivine (A French village) and directed by Jean-Philippe Amar (gears), aim to depict the daily life of these young French soldiers while questioning the ins and outs of the war in the Sahel.
The idea for the series was born in the summer of 2015 when Thibault Valetoux passed a bistro where young soldiers in uniform were drinking beer. “I told myself that they looked like me since they drank beers and at the same time, not so much because they had made different life choices from mine. It became the desire to make a series about a group of young people engaged in the army, who find themselves grappling with the consequences of their choice, ”explains the screenwriter.
The portrait of a youth who joined the Army
In SentinelsPauline Parigot (Ghosts) is Lieutenant Anaïs Collet, a rare example of a female non-commissioned officer in the Army at the head of a combat section. Under his orders, Julien Ravalet (Louis Peres, seen in Germinal and Mental), a hothead crushed by the crushing figure of a multi-decorated father general, Mendy Martial (Birane Ba, auxiliary artist at the Comédie-Française since September 2018), a young, idealistic, black and Muslim corporal whose convictions will come up against the reality on the ground, and Djibril Saadi, hired out of idleness following the bataclan attacks, committed in the name of an Islam that is not his own. The section is under the responsibility of Captain Philippe Lefort (Yannick Choirat, seen in Victor Hugo, enemy of the state), deeply human officer, veteran of Afghanistan, constantly torn between his missions and his morals. “There are as many reasons to enlist as there are soldiers,” comments Thibault Valetoux.
An inextricable geopolitical situation
Sentinels opens with an ambush with dramatic consequences, which revives tensions between the military and the Malian population, which accepts the French presence less and less. “He has a question about postcolonialism, what are we doing over there in Mali? When I joined this project, I didn’t have an answer, but it’s a real question”, explains Frédéric Krivine. During his research for the series, he discovers “an apparent accumulation of success”, relayed in the media. “The images did not show successes, but the daily life of soldiers in hot weather, not exactly great victories against jihadism,” he said.
And the screenwriter to share his analysis: “My conviction, which was made and which we share with Thibault, was that we had to go there in 2013, there was no choice. But today, there is no longer any chance of taking an action that is really beneficial either for France, because we absolutely do not protect against terrorism in mainland France by this Barkhane action, or for Mali unfortunately. The major problems of the Malian population can be linked to the jihadists, but fundamentally, the Malian state which does not manage to play its role. […] The population sees that there is the French army which is there and which does not solve any of the problems they have on a daily basis and not even the problems with jihadism. Suddenly, it is an impasse that can only last. The Americans encountered roughly in a very different country, Afghanistan, roughly the same situation. […] The coup and this junta give France a formidable way out. »
“There are shows where audiences identify with people who are going to basically solve the problems of the world and their own, and shows that identify people who aren’t really going to solve problems, but are going to understand that they can not. In these two dramatic families, we are clearly in both”, concludes Frédéric Krivine.
Source: 20minutes
