On January 7th, 2015, French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo paid an absurd, immeasurable price for printing cartoons featuring the prophet Mohammed, when two brothers, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, members of the Yemen branch of al-Qaeda, opened fire in their offices, murdering eleven people, injuring eleven more and killing a policeman outside the building.
Charlie Hebdo journalist Laurent Léger, a survivor of the massacre, recalls seeing what he describes as “…the shapes of my friends on the floor.” Disbelief in the recorded voice of emergency services is audible as it repeatedly asks the doctor at the scene to confirm the number of the dead. TV producer Martin Boudot, whose TV production company Premieres Lignes stood across the hall from the Charlie Hebdo offices, tells of his escape along with his colleagues to the rooftop. Footage from his camera phone captures the confusion, fear, and the way in which dreadful occurrences aren’t necessarily comprehended with any immediacy. We see the Kouachi brothers down on the street declaring “We’ve avenged the prophet Mohammed” before gunning down a policeman. Moments later, gathering police, visibly shocked by the death of their colleague, still have no clue of the mass murder that has just taken place only yards away.
The manhunt for the Kouachi brothers that led to the Dammartin-en-Goële print works shootout, jumps back and forth from another act of terrorism happening at the same time. The perpetrator is ISIS affiliated Amedy Coulibaly, who knew one of the Kouachi brothers from time spent in prison together. Between them, they possess a cache of Kalashnikovs, rocket launchers and dynamite. Coulibaly takes hostages and kills within a Parisian kosher grocery store. Stills from the security camera of those hiding in the store’s basement accompany accounts from surviving hostages and police as well as a Gendarmerie Special Forces Commander and sniper, both masked. Interestingly, a number of civilian interviewees opt for anonymity by having their faces partially filmed or averted from the camera.
The horror and anticipation of day three in two parts are perfectly captured. Director Dan Reed has put aside the fatigue of those events in favor of a gripping first-hand chronology. The results are that those directly involved including the ones that got away, link together a chain of events that present themselves more personally and coherently than the international news coverage, which projected a ubiquitous sense of morbid expectation. But as a national security expert comments, ...."add to the fact that our intelligence services monitor nearly 2000 people, I see no reason to be optimistic”.
The film segues into a grand-scale and all too familiar Paris atrocity when we are told that Prof. Tourtier, the first doctor at the Charlie Hebdo murder scene, was called to the Bataclan theater just hours after his emotional interview, where 90 people were killed in the terror attacks of November 13th, 2015.
