“Confronted with the courage of others, I had to speak for myself. When she met director Anastasia Mikova at a mutual friend’s house, Emmanuelle Béart told her incest she suffered between the ages of 11 and 15. Together, they reflect on the best way to approach the subject. A fiction ? An adaptation ?
Very quickly, they agree on the idea of a documentary, which they would write together. The actress wants to give the floor to other witnesses. By sharing their story, she understands that she must add her voice to theirs and show that “a wounded child can become a fighting adult. “There is a time to survive and a time to act,” explains Guy Béart’s daughter, who clarifies that her father is not her attacker. “Un silence si noisy”, a punchy film, will be broadcast on M6 on September 24, at 11:10 p.m.
“No, I will not be silent”
” I am 11 years old. It’s night, I’m sure of it, ”she says by way of introduction. Someone rips her nightgown. For 4 years, the dark, the cold. However, “no cry comes out. The words do not form. “When it’s day again, everything seems intact,” continues the actress. It took three years to make this film, in which we see her doubting, crying, and moving forward with her fellow soldiers.
When she watches the first images filmed by Anastasia Mikova, in which Norma confides “no, I will not be silent. This is the first instruction that my grandfather told me. He will not have won”, the actress revealed by “Manon des Sources” blows: “It will be super hard… I no longer want to do it. And yet, it has to be.
By sharing the story of Norma, but also that of Joachim, one of the few men to have responded to the call for witnesses, by both parents, of Sarah, who fights against the silence of institutions unable to protect her daughter, by Pascale, whom she sees reborn before her eyes at over 50, she borrows with them the long road to resilience. Each story is different, but all understand each other. Their testimonies are shocking. And point to the inability of today’s society to hear them.
Several “circles of silence”
Three years later the publication of “La Familia grande”, by Camille KouchnerJudge Édouard Durand, co-president of the Independent Commission on Incest and Abuse of Children (Ciivise), to whom the documentary also gives the floor, denounces a paradox. “At the same time that society tells children, speak, she said to them: we won’t believe you “, he regrets, questioning, among other things, the concept of parental alienation syndrome.
How not to scream when hearing Sarah tell that a family court judge ordered her to continue to entrust her daughter to the one who abused her? How not to be revolted to know that Norma’s grandfather was sentenced to a prison term “lighter than someone who stole a car”? With the damages received at the end of the trial, she created a show in which she speaks, with humor and emotion, of what she has experienced.
Emmanuelle Béart did not file a complaint. “I told my father, my mother, my brothers and sisters,” she explains to Joachim. But in people, it does not print. She speaks of “a super heavy secret”, made up of several “circles of silence”: “yours, that of your loved ones, that of society. It is urgent to break them.
In France, it is estimated that one person in ten is a victim of incest. One in five girls, one in twelve boys. “At least 6 million people,” insists the director. “Such a noisy silence” will be screened at the Secretary of State for Children on September 19.