Led by Pierre Niney, Gilles Lellouche and Emmanuelle Bercot, is Goliath based on real facts?
Goliath, released on March 9 at the cinema, relates the destiny of three characters who should never have crossed paths. France (Emmanuelle Bercot), sports teacher by day, worker by night, is an active campaigner against the use of pesticides.
Patrick (Gilles Lellouche), obscure and solitary Parisian lawyer, is a specialist in environmental law. Mathias (Pierre Niney), a brilliant lobbyist and man in a hurry, defends the interests of an agrochemical giant.
Following the radical act of an anonymous person, these three destinies, which should never have crossed paths, will jostle, collide and ignite.
TRUE STORY OR TOTAL INVENTION?
In the film, the pesticide defended by lobbyist Mathias is called Tetrazine. In reality, the director Frédéric Tellier based himself on a real phytosanitary scandal, that of glyphosate.
This is a chemical found in herbicides to kill unwanted plants. Very effective, inexpensive and easy to use, it is widely used by farmers.
However, glyphosate remains very controversial, accused of being toxic. However, the European Union has authorized it until December 2022. In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a WHO agency, classified the product as a “probable carcinogen” for humans. .
As Pierre Niney points out to our microphone, Emmanuel Macron gave his “presidential word” in 2017, assuring that glysophate would be banned within three years. This promise has never been kept.
Indeed, farmers have no more effective and easy-to-use alternatives than this product; many of them are therefore against the possible ban. The government is therefore still cautious on this subject.
“Our position is to say that we must get out of glyphosate whenever possible. As the President of the Republic reminded us, this position must also be taken to European level because we are in a common market and therefore the transitions must be brought to this scale to avoid any distortion of competition”said the Minister of Agriculture, Julien Denormandie, in March 2021.
A LONG WORK OF INVESTIGATION
Glyphosate consumption is still very high in France. In 2020, it amounted to 8,645 tonnes. Frédéric Tellier therefore wove his scenario from this controversy, inventing all the rest of his story.
“I was writing L’Affaire SK1 when I discovered this question of pesticides by accidentally coming across a small book of observations which did not speak exclusively of pesticides but more broadly of the alert on the agricultural environment and on what we eat”confides the filmmaker in the Goliath press kit.
“Reading this first began by upsetting my life as a citizen and consumer. I told myself that this observation on the state of our agriculture, our civilization, our way of consuming, our ability not to see the chaos around us, corresponded in fact to our individual as well as collective history”explains the director.
It took more than 5 years of work for the filmmaker to do his research and start writing his script, in collaboration with Simon Moutaïrou.
“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”reveals Frédéric Tellier.
“At the start, I also thought of chaining L’Affaire SK1 and Goliath, but Save or Perish went faster, or rather Goliath, because of this complicated investigation, took more time”he says.
Goliath has been in theaters since March 9.
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