Once they arrived at the barracks and after six months of intensive training, the two friends became disillusioned. Their hierarchy is much less inspiring than they had imagined… Between Commander Laurent François, a former senior officer in the gendarmerie, whom Marc is responsible for escorting to his hearings in a case of embezzlement and various trafficking , and Franky’s superior, Warrant Officer Debels (Titus De Voogdt), openly racist and member of a secret group with a strange code of honor, the reality is far from fulfilling their hopes… For her part, Vicky s engages more and more in student life and on campus where she prefers not to reveal the profession of her brother and her best friend.
When Marc discovers that things are getting out of hand, he decides to volunteer to help clear up this dark matter of internal rivalries that seems to indicate that the “service war” has crossed a new threshold.
A case not yet solved
Created by Willem Wallyn (of 16), series 1985 is dedicated to the victims of the Killers of Brabant and their families “to whom, until today, justice has not yet been done”, recalls a message broadcast at the end of the first episode. Willem Wallyn approaches this national trauma by refusing any sensationalism as had already been the case in the film Do not shoot by Stijn Coninx, also devoted to the history of the Band of Nivelles, as it is called in Flanders. It is by following the long and patient work of the investigators, within the gendarmerie, that the screenwriter intends to reveal the thick web of slippages in cascades and diffuse responsibilities, within the political and judicial worlds, which led to the events tragedies that marked the 80s in Belgium.
Directed by Wouter Bouvijn (The Twelve, Red light), the series takes care of its eighties atmospheres and its human profiles struck by an implacable fate. By approaching the facts from the small end of the telescope – through the journey of these three young fictional characters -, the series makes it possible to trace the actions of the real protagonists of the drama, between “pink ballets” and arms and drug trafficking. . It thus awakens the collective memory around one of the most striking cases in the history of the flat country which had caused a real psychosis in the 80s. Better known under the name of “Killings of Brabant”, they are for the first time evoked in the form of fiction through a documented and neat series broadcast in parallel on RTBF and VRT from this Sunday, January 22.
In the cast of the series, we find French-speaking and Dutch-speaking actors such as Roda Fawaz (Unit 42, Unseen), but also Guillaume Kerbusch and Yoann Blanc (Truce),… Aimé Claeys, Mona Mina Leon and Tijmen Govaerts play the two young gendarmes and the young VUB student immersed, despite themselves, in the heart of this terrible affair. In the series, we also cross paths with Peter Van den Begin (Pandora, Good People) and Tom Vermeir (The Twelve) well known to Belgian series enthusiasts.
Contemporary challenges of Belgian fiction
The principle adopted by the scriptwriter and the director is that everyone plays in the language that was that of the real people involved in the case at the time. Hitting commercial surfaces on both sides of the linguistic border which splits Brabant in two, the case had mobilized police, gendarmes, political leaders and ordinary Flemish and French-speaking citizens.
Presented in competition at the Festival CanneSeries, but also at the festivals of Ghent, Liège and Brussels, the 1985 series stands out for its narrative assets and its historical relevance. The first bilingual series, produced by the two major Belgian public channels, VRT and RTBF, it underlines the desire of black-yellow-red fiction to come up against the challenges and questions of its contemporary history. It will be offered in France and internationally by StudioCanal.
★★★ 1985 History in question Creation Willem Wallyn Realization Wouter Bouvijn With Tijmen Govaerts, Aimé Claeys, Roda Fawaz, Mona Mina Leon, Guillaume Kerbusch… On La Une RTBF and on Een (VRT) From January 22 (8 x 52′)