The disciplinary block – or “mitard” – is a feared place: it is there that the prisoners who are problematic, considered to be aggressive or violent, are placed. You are locked up there alone, with almost no contact with the outside world. It is the “prison within the prison”.

It is this reality that Vincent Marcel and Laurence Delleur propose to tell. The bias of the two directors: to talk about former convicts who went to the mitard, but also former prison guards, and even a prison director (under cover of anonymity).

All describe a dark reality, made up of humiliations and violence: the witnesses speak of the beatings received and given (when it is the guards who speak), the body searches, the feeling of extreme isolation that one feels . Thus, a former “con” explains that, in order to be able to have contact with the supervisors who turned a deaf ear to her calls, she had to block the latrines, activate the flush dozens of times in a row to create water damage so that finally come to his cell.

quest for truth

But Vincent Marcel and Laurence Delleur are not satisfied with this story. Their poignant and fascinating documentary is built around the story of Mahamadou Fofana, a shy young man in search of the truth: his brother Amara was found dead in 2019 in the disciplinary district of Réau (Seine-et-Marne). His research is the red thread of the film. This explains, among other things, its title, Mitard, the blind spot. Indeed, the cameras do not film all the common areas and there are none in the cells. So there are blind spots, where violence against detainees often takes place.

Mahamadou Fofana finds his brother’s former fellow prisoners, who all describe a rather peaceful young man who is not at all suicidal. With them, he deciphers the surveillance videos of the day of Amara’s death, amputated by several minutes of recording without his knowing the reason. He solicited the International Observatory of Prisons and finally filed a complaint with his family for “violence resulting in death without intention to give it”.

It is touching, Mahamadou Fofana, when he goes with his lawyer, Benoît David, to seek the help of the environmental senator of Bouches-du-Rhône Guy Benarroche, very at the forefront on the prison question. The young man is intimidated and even seems embarrassed to find himself under the gilding of the Luxembourg Palace. But it does not disassemble. Mr. Benarroche will visit the disciplinary district of Réau, will ask a question on this subject to Eric Dupond-Moretti, Keeper of the Seals. Difficult to do more.

The documentary also focuses on the death by asphyxiation of Sambaly Diabaté, 33, in 2016, at the Saint-Martin-de-Ré prison (Charente-Maritime), during his transfer to the disciplinary unit, and on the suicide of Sacha Aït Hammou, 18, in Saint-Brieuc. Sentenced to six months in prison for stealing from the cash register of the supermarket where he worked, he had been placed in disciplinary quarters after a fight, a sanction he feared more than anything for having already known her a few weeks earlier.

Finally, the “blind spot” of which the documentary speaks is that of a French society which does not want to see the prison reality in France.