Sambre

Jean-Xavier de Lestrade won an Academy Award for Murder on a Sunday Morning in 2002 and spent the following two decades making documentaries about justice systems failing the people who depend on them — most famously The Staircase. Sambre, his six-part drama for France 2 and RTBF, applies that documentary temperament to fiction. It was adapted with Marc Herpoux from Alice Géraud's book on the case of Dino Scala, who assaulted women along the same stretch of road in the Nord for some thirty years before he was caught.

De Lestrade's structural decision is the series' defining one: rather than following an investigation, each episode shifts to a different person standing somewhere in the chain — a victim, a gendarme, a magistrate, a mayor, a wife. The effect is cumulative and quietly furious, an anatomy of how ordinary professional indifference compounds into three decades of impunity. Alix Poisson anchors the first hour; Olivier Gourmet, Jonathan Turnbull and Julien Frison appear as the case passes between hands. The period detail runs from the late 1980s forward without ever announcing itself.

French critics treated it as an event. The Syndicat français de la critique named it the year's best French series, and the Association des Critiques de Séries gave it four awards including best series, best direction and best performance for Poisson. It won the Magnolia Award for best foreign miniseries at the Shanghai TV Festival in 2024, and reached British audiences on BBC Four as Sambre: Anatomy of a Crime.