The legacy of a tragedy

On Tuesday the Non-fiction It took us into a historical tragedy well-known in the world of motorsports, but one that hides many other perspectives. Seventy years ago, in the world's most famous endurance race, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, a Mercedes driven by Pierre Levegh took off from the track and exploded into the spectator stands at over 250 kilometers per hour. There were 82 deaths and 120 injuries. Le Mans, the tragedy of 55 It's a documentary in which director Emmanuel Reyé investigates this disaster, motivated by family secrecy. Two of his uncles, whom he never met, died in the accident. They were his father's brothers. His grandfather and another brother were saved because they had just happened to be leaving the stands. Reyé learned of this trauma when he was 17, through an acquaintance. It was never discussed at home, a result of the immense pain they carried. Decades later, driven by the need to discover what lay behind that silence and understand what happened, he began to reconstruct the case. He did so with an added difficulty: the reluctance of archives and administrations to provide the information they hold.

Le Mans, the tragedy of 55 It is an investigative process involving witnesses, experts, and two uncles who agree to explain what they remember. Reyé notes the multiple versions and the confusion surrounding the story. The documentary has three strands. First, the car accident: the reconstruction of the events, the technical and mechanical analysis, the reasons that led to it, the negligence... The conclusions drawn from the exhaustive evaluation of the archive images are very interesting. Second, it investigates everything that happened afterward: the attempts to cover it up, the reactions of the authorities, and, surprisingly, all the historical, social, business, economic, and political implications that shielded the case from public clarification. It had only been ten years since the end of the Second World War, and attempts were being made to restore Franco-German relations. The fact that the car involved in the catastrophe was German could destabilize the negotiations. The race, despite the number of dead and injured, did not stop. The strident, strident accordion music that enlivened the party continued to play amidst that Dantesque scene of bodies and fire. And thirdly, there is a tangential aspect to the previous two, one that is deeply moving and that allows the story to go beyond the specific case. Reyé seeks to understand the family's silence. The discovery of grandfather's letters, of family photo albums in memory of the deceased children, and the reluctance of the surviving uncles to remember those days becomes an exploration of the trauma that has been passed down from generation to generation. It is a look at the invisible burden of shared pain, yet one that is not verbalized. A reflection on how we become the custodians of a family history without having chosen it.