“Such a Loud Silence” premiered ahead of its September 24 television broadcast.
“I’m 11, it’s night, I’m sure, you’re tearing my sleep, I’m very cold, no cry comes out of my mouth, my mouth is sewn.” It is with these words that the actress Emmanuelle Béart, now 60 years old, reveals to have been a victim of incest in a documentary, presented in preview to the press, Tuesday September 5, by M6. “My father, my mother, my school, my friends do not see anything. Everything can start again and you will start again for four years”continues the actress in A silence so louda film she co-directed and which will be released on September 24.
Before the screening, Anastasia Mikova, co-director, clarified that the attacker of Emmanuelle Béart, absent during the presentation of the documentary, was not her father, the songwriter Guy Béart. “She does not want to reveal her identity, it is not her approach, it is not a settling of accounts”, she said. In the documentary, the actress also declares: “If my grandmother hadn’t intervened, if she hadn’t put me on a train at 15 to go and join my father, I don’t know if I could have lived.”
“It’s a choral, collective film”
It is the meeting with the director Anastasia Mikova, a “thunderbolt”, which allowed this figure of French cinema to speak. But A silence so loud does not highlight the only incest suffered by Emmanuelle Béart during her adolescence. It also looks at the story of three adults, Norma, Pascale and Joachim, and a child. “It’s a choral, collective film”explained Anastasia Mikova, recalling the commonly accepted figures on the victims of incest: “10% of the French population, 6 million people.” In an introductory remark recorded and broadcast during the preview, Emmanuelle Béart insisted on the societal impact of this documentary, beyond her personal case.
“There is time to survive and time to act. We are in that time. We need a political response, because incest is a collective trauma.”
Emmanuelle Beartin a message broadcast during the premiere of “A Silence So Loud”
At the end of the screening, Judge Edouard Durand, who chairs the Independent Commission on Incest and Sexual Violence Against Children (Ciivise) and testifies in the documentary, welcomed “one of the most beautiful things[‘il ait] views of [sa] life in twenty years of combating violence against children”.
“This documentary is absolutely accurate, everything is fair. Society does not want to fight against [l’inceste] and all the testimonies, which are of unequaled truth, make it clear.”
Judge Edouard Durand, President of the Ciiviseat the premiere of “A Silence So Loud”
“From September 24, children will be better protected thanks to this film”added Edouard Durand. Pascale, one of the victims who testifies in the documentary, accuses her father, now deceased, of having raped her from the age of 3 to 13. She, for her part, asserted that “this movie him [avait] allowed to [se] exceed”.