Goliath: is the film inspired by a true story?

Event this Friday, September 23 at 9 p.m. on Canal+ with the very first broadcast of Goliath, film co-written and directed by Frédéric Tellier with Pierre Niney and Gilles Lellouche. For the occasion, Télé Star invites you to find out more about this thriller with 780,000 entries in theaters in 2022 and to discover in particular whether it is inspired by a true story.

In Goliath, Gilles Lellouche plays Patrick Fameau, a lawyer whose client, Lucie Tauran, sued a large group of chemical products. She blames one of their pesticides, the Tetrazine, of causing the death of his wife, Margot. Seeing that justice is on the manufacturer’s side, Lucie decides to set herself on fire in front of the group’s headquarters. The shareholders then call on Mathias Roxen, played by Pierre Niney, a lobbyist specializing in crisis situations who will try to divert the attention of the media and the public from this tragedy.

Goliath on Canal+: Tetrazine not to say glyphosate

If in the film broadcast this Friday on Canal+, the pesticide in question is called Tetrazine, the director was, in reality, greatly inspired by the glyphosate scandal. The latter is a pesticide present in herbicides to eliminate undesirable plants and is widely used by farmers. Classified as a “probable carcinogen” for humans by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a WHO agency, in 2015, glyphosate should have been prohibited for use in France from December 2022 despite the anger of some farmers who consider that they have no other alternatives. But this ban was rejected by the European Union. It was while discovering a small book on the agricultural world that Frédéric Tellier discovered the glyphosate scandal. “I then embarked on an investigation that lasted more or less 5 years because the environment is very opaque. Few books talk about the lobbies environment, and very few agrochemical lobbyists, so-called politicians committed or specialized journalists agree to tell, to testify”he explains to our colleagues from Allociné.

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