Conviction

Fascinated by the workings of the justice system, Antoine Raimbault had already made a short film in 2014 (Vos violences) in which barrister Éric Dupond-Moretti played the role of a lawyer who was the victim of an assault, torn between his determination to convict the guilty party and his respect for the presumption of innocence. This film is pure fiction, but heralded the young author’s first feature film, Conviction, adapted from a real-life case, that of the disappearance in 2000 of Suzanne Viguier, and the ten-year legal odyssey experienced since then by her husband, Jacques, himself a professor of law. (...) The couple, who were apparently united, proved to be explosive. Nora’s visceral passion, convinced of the truth she defends while becoming enraged by it, finds in the tempestuous lawyer a man committed to the ethics of his profession, which is to ensure that, in the face of the institutional machine, doubt prevails in the absence of proof. The story of the film could be read as the director’s necessary distancing of his own subjectivity from this case." (Jacques Mandelbaum; Le Monde)