The re-enactment of L’affaire Dominici

	Bruno Slagmulder is Gustave Dominici (the son). Next to him is DP Alain Levent.

Executive Producer Ilya Claisse anticipates that the two-part television portrayal of L’affaire Dominici (The Dominici Affair) will spark fresh controversy about the infamous case of Gaston Dominici. In 1952, at 75 years of age, he was officially found guilty of the brutal murder of Sir Jack Drummond, his wife and daughter in the South of France.

In a bid to quell French public opinion as the story rapidly gripped the nation, a superficial inquiry was carried out and the elderly patriarch was given a death sentence in 1954. Eventually pardoned by General de Gaulle in 1960, he died five years later at 88. Half a century on, doubts persist and the case has never been resolved. Dominici’s grandson is optimistic that this faithful reconstruction based on investigative work by William Reymond will result in a re-opening of the case.

“Reviewing the trial was no easy matter,” says Claisse, “and we now know that whole sections of the inquiry were spent in silence or were distorted, even altered. Some of the evidence wasn’t even taken into account.”