“The Forgotten of the Delta” is a detective TV film with a historical background: the tragic fate of thousands of Vietnamese workers, forcibly requisitioned to develop rice farming in the Camargue in the 1940s.
On a construction site in the heart of the Camargue, workers make a macabre discovery: dozens of human bones more than 70 years old. The investigation led by commissioners Marianne Prévost and Lola Hardon reveals that the bodies, all of Asian origin except one, correspond to Indochinese workers exploited in the region during the colonial era. The detective TV film “Les Oulés du Delta”, with Isabelle Gélinas and Raphaëlle Rousseau, begins on this plot which mixes detective fiction and dark historical reality.
Because in the Rhône delta, thousands of Vietnamese were actually forcibly conscripted from 1939 to replace the French who had gone to the front in the fields. Around 20,000 of these “worker-soldiers”, nicknamed the “Công Binh”, will be brought to France, parked in camps in the center of the country or in the vicinity of Marseille, before being sent by the regime of Vichy in arms factories, construction sites, salt works or forests, in deplorable conditions.
“Hell” for thousands of Indochinese
Despised in France, considered traitors or collaborators in Vietnam, these forgotten by history will be nearly 2000 working in the Camargue to cultivate rice intended for livestock feed. Director of a documentary on the subject, Lam Lê explains: “At the time the Camargue was hell, populated by mosquitoes, and the rice that was grown there was inedible, reserved for animals. It was they who created the rice fields of Camargue”. In this unsanitary region, the living and working conditions of the Công Binh were appalling, with many succumbing to illness, exhaustion, and even mistreatment.
Some of these forced laborers remained after the war, integrating as best they could, but their story was largely forgotten. The corpses exhumed at the start of the TV film recall this buried past. For producer Delphine Wautier, “it is not a simple detective fiction, another thriller, but a contemporary intrigue, strong romantic and documented, taking its roots in a page of Camargue history, the cultivation of rice by Indochinese workers”.
In fiction, the body of a European woman found among them raises other questions about the tragedies and unspeakable secrets of this era. The Forgotten of the Delta, which reveals this dark and little-known part of colonial history, was programmed on France 3 on October 25, 2024.