The 10th District Court: Moments of Trial

A criminal court in Paris, the tenth chamber, which handles minor offences. The documentary filmed the hearings that took place there in the summer of 2003: drink driving, insult, carrying a weapon, theft. The defendants come in one by one and mostly do not have the language to defend themselves. The judge is the same person throughout; a dozen or so hearings were chosen out of more than two hundred. Raymond Depardon's film was made with permission to bring a camera into the court. No commentary, no narration, no reconstruction; only the hearings. Depardon had made a film on the same subject ten years earlier. What the film lays out is less crime than inequality: someone who knows how to speak and someone who does not are not getting the same outcome in the same room. It screened out of competition at Cannes in 2004.