Rare French series to address the theme of war, Sentinels arrives this Tuesday, April 5 on OCS.
Presented in preview at Séries Mania where it marked the festival-goers, Sentinelles delves into the daily life of soldiers of the French army engaged in Mali since 2014, within the framework of Operation Barkhane called to fight there against jihadism.
For more realism, the scriptwriters and the actors benefited from the advice of the French army. “We spent a week immersed in a barracks in Orleans,” says actress Pauline Parigot, who plays Lieutenant Anaïs Collet and plays the role of Louis Peres in particular. “We learned in particular how to assemble and disassemble weapons,” confirms the actor seen in Germinal, for whom filming in the Moroccan desert under peaks of 53 degrees was trying, but did not require them to make any effort. imagination: “We were thus under the heat of Mali”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ovf3UH7jTzk
not a documentary
“Reality interests us only so as not to be out of step with what we are saying, but we are not doing reality: we are doing human comedy”, specified the co-author of the series Alain Krivine (Un French village), according to comments reported by AFP.
“The desire was to make a series on youth and commitment, for his part entrusted Thibault Valetoux, co-creator and screenwriter. It was a question of “understanding what is hidden behind the uniform, (…) to seek the specificity of each one as a human being”.
The pitch: In the Mopti region of Mali, Lieutenant Anaïs Collet’s section, deployed as part of Operation Barkhane, is dedicated to tracking down terrorists. But an ambush revives tensions between the military and the Malian population, which accepts the French presence less and less.