It is a little after 7 p.m. on September 21, 2012, near the Mosson stadium, in Montpellier (Hérault). Florent Castineira only has a few days to wait before he can once again encourage the MHSC that he loves so much. This 21-year-old young man, banned from setting foot in a stadium for a year because he had tried to enter the stands in 2011, with a smoke bomb, joined fellow supporters on the terrace of a fries shack, before the kick-off of a match against Saint-Etienne.
The one that everyone, at Butte Paillade, nicknames Casti, dreams of only one thing, slumped on a plastic chair: to attend, in Germany, the meeting between Schalke 04 and his favorite club, which lives that year his first Champions League. He can, he knows it, because the suspension that he respected to the letter is coming to an end. But that evening, on the banks of the Mosson, a police officer’s flash-ball shot, which he received in the face, changed his destiny. Casti will not go to Germany to see Younès Belhanda play. The Montpellier man lost the use of one eye. And he is preparing to endure a painful legal battle, which will take him from disillusionment to disillusionment.
“Florent [Castineira] was an integral part of the project”
This story, which made the front page of the press, is told in a comic strip, published by Delcourt editions: in Casti, When the State mutilates, the Caesarized designer Aurel and the screenwriters Laura Kotelnikoff-Béart and Antoine Aubry reopen this affair, which left its mark on the community of Ultras of France, and deliver an interpretation of it, through the testimony of Casti. “Florent [Castineira] was an integral part of the project, confides Antoine Aubry. After going through all the press articles and the legal file of the case, we questioned him for several dozen hours. He followed the writing of the investigation throughout its construction, in order to verify the chronology and accuracy of the facts, and his relatives and his lawyers were also questioned at length. »
From the flash-ball shot which blinded the young Montpellier supporter, to the grueling legal decisions which punctuated his story, “all the scenes come from facts related by Casti and other people, sometimes from several points of view, and always with as much detail as possible, explains Laura Kotelnikoff-Béart. Using this information, we visually reconstructed the story and recreated dialogues. » With, at a minimum, a degree of freedom, in certain scenes. “If we knew, for example, how the scene happened where the Montpellier Ultras made a banner before a demonstration, we had to imagine how it would unfold,” continues the screenwriter.
The drawing brings to the story “something very clear and very powerful”
The advantage of a comic strip is that it allows you to show things that no other medium (besides fiction, perhaps) would have allowed. Like this striking moment when Casti is injured. Or the one where he sees again, in a nightmare, the rubber ball rushing towards him. “Drawing allows, in particular, to put into images certain concepts, or certain facts, which would be difficult to show, incomprehensible or illegible, if they were real images,” confides Aurel. It was by discovering the album Green algae, the forbidden storypublished in 2019 by Delcourt, which evokes this mysterious phenomenon which shook the Breton beaches, which the screenwriters of Casti, When the State mutilates decided to opt for drawing, to tell the story of Casti. “Drawing allows you to recreate the key moments of a long and complex investigation and thus gives something both very clear and very powerful,” emphasizes Antoine Aubry.
If the personal reconstruction of the supporter is at the heart of the album, the screenwriters have nevertheless mixed into its story testimonies from sociologists, doctors and activists, who question the use of non-lethal weapons. Or rather “reduced lethality”, as we should call them”, confides Antoine Aubry. “Florent’s story [Castineira] allows us to show readers the different stages through which a victim of police violence will have to go, their psychological impact and the multiple difficulties caused by the injury. But what it also allows is to show the systemic aspect of this violence, the different cogs of a machine, and the way in which they crush a victim and/or their loved ones. Starting from the portrait of an injured person, and in particular that of Casti who became an activist against police violence, we ended up sketching a landscape, an overall view. That’s what interested us. »
“If this story helps to reverse the indifference of some people regarding systemic violence, it would already be a great victory for us”
Eleven years after that flashball shot that turned Casti’s life upside down, could this album help to shake things up? “Those who mainly make things happen are the injured, the families of victims and the activists against police violence who have been fighting for many years, particularly in working-class neighborhoods,” confides Laura Kotelnikoff-Béart. Because we must not forget that the inhabitants of these neighborhoods are the first victims of the crushing machine that we describe in the comic strip. Afterwards, if this story helps to reverse the indifference of some people regarding systemic violence, it would already be a great victory for us. »
On March 15, 2018, the Montpellier Court of Appeal pronounced a final dismissal of the case in the Casti case. Seven months later, however, the administrative court designated the State as responsible for the young man’s injuries. “A personal victory,” says Casti, in the album’s afterword. That day, “everything started to change. I started to think less about the injury, to look ahead. However, there will always be regret. That of having allowed justice to put my life on hold.”