Disney+ dissects the story of Vincent Lambert in a documentary series

Available from May 10, the series “Lambert against Lambert: in the name of Vincent“tells” for the first time in its entirety and with all points of view” the story of Vincent Lambert, described to AFP Elodie Buzuel, its author and co-director.

The result of two years of work, the series returns in four episodes to the tragedy experienced by this man, who became a quadriplegic and entered a vegetative state at the age of 32 after a car accident in September 2008.

She also dissects the trauma and the repercussions experienced by her loved ones who, divided between keeping her alive and stopping her care, tore themselves apart for six years in court, to the point of changing the law on the end of life. in 2016, under the leadership of President François Hollande.

“Who would want to live in a vegetative state?“: this question, launched in front of the camera by Eric Kariger, one of Vincent Lambert’s first doctors at the Reims University Hospital, is at the heart of the documentary produced by Zadig Productions.

“I wanted to make a film that was committed but not militant, i.e. one that created debate and commitment“, explains Elodie Buzuel.

To do this, the author collected around thirty testimonies between members of the Lambert family, friends, doctors, lawyers, politicians, senior civil servants, journalists or religious and association representatives.

“It was very important to have this plurality of points of view, we didn’t want to make a film to charge or disclaim” but “place the spectator in a position where he could understand the actions of each other“, adds producer Julie Perris.

“The great strength of this series is to have also had for the first time the testimony on the duration of Viviane Lambert“, mother of Vincent, since deceased, adds Pauline Dauvin, vice-president in charge of original productions at Walt Disney France.

Close a chapter

On the screen, testimonies, photos and scenes of reconstruction follow one another, painting an intimate portrait of Vincent Lambert, of his “complicated place” within “a complicated family”, according to a journalist interviewed.

Traditionalist Catholics, his parents had only formalized their relationship in 1982 after the birth of four children born of their extramarital relationship, and when Vincent, the eldest, was six years old.

“We made a commitment to the family, especially his wife Rachel, never to show Vincent diminished and not to show his face after the accident.“, hence the use of reconstructions to put it “at the center” of the story, relates co-director Vincent Trisolini.

A year after the release of the “Oussekine” series, which returned to the Malik Oussekine case, who died under the blows of the police in 1986, Disney+ is once again seizing an individual story which is part of that from France.

Added to the chronological sequence, over the episodes, are layers of analysis such as the conception of resuscitation medicine in France, the management of “cases of altered consciousness”, the taboo of death or the way in which the protagonists have been “dispossessed of their history” by the ultra-mediatization, exposes the author.

Having questioned them “two and a half years” after the death of Vincent Lambert, in July 2019, “(allowed) us to have an analysis and not stay only on the narration“, continues Elodie Buzuel.

The documentary was also an opportunity for Rachel Lambert “to close a chapter to finally move on since this work had never been done“, she reports.

And “to leave an inheritance to his daughter“, born two months before her husband’s accident, “it’s also his story and it allows him to keep something of it“.