A sober long-term portrait, on a highly flammable subject.
Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, sentenced in 1984 to life imprisonment for complicity in the terrorist assassination of two American and Israeli diplomats, regained his freedom in 2025 after a record forty-one years of imprisonment. Released in 1999, he had since seen all his requests to this effect refused or made conditional on clauses which he considered to be systematically unacceptable, Abdallah being unable to apologize or compensate the victims, which in his eyes would amount to ceding moral victory to regimes. child bombers.
Pierre Carles, a political documentarian who is not very cautious and who readily approaches people, to whom we owe in particular a legendary portrait of Bourdieu (Sociology is a combat sport, 2001), traces the life of France’s most famous political prisoner, from the complex political climate of the 1980s to these endless years of constantly postponed hope of release. The Abdallah Affair is certainly not his wildest film, e
But it is perhaps precisely because the hidden subject, here and as often with Carles, is the freedom of the press, reduced on television to crumbs on which he has ceased to count. Cinema, then, still allows him to do this work of discernment necessary to look at Abdallah for what he is and not for what the fascistic audiovisual landscape has made of him in recent years – and which he would do or will no doubt still do, in the face of the political and moral complexities that his anti-imperialism raises, or at the simple sight of Rima Hassan visiting him in prison in the opening.
The Abdallah Affair by Pierre Carles (Fra., 2026, 1 h 41). In theaters April 8.
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