The Vrai platform offers a chilling documentary thriller by recounting, almost 30 years after the events, the collective suicides and murders linked to the sect of The Order of the Solar Temple (OTS).
Director Jean-François Poisson and chief researcher Sophie Charest, to whom we owe “The Crook”, turned all the stones to tell how Joseph Di Mambro and Luc Jouret led 74 people to death, from 1994 to 1997, in France, Quebec and Switzerland.
Di Mambro and Jouret wanted to make a “transit” to the star Sirius to escape the end of the world on Earth and, perhaps also, all the attention the sect had been receiving since it was revealed, in 1993, that she had infiltrated Hydro-Québec. The collective suicides should even have taken place in Quebec, but the gurus would have moved them to Europe and even moved ahead of them because of all the paranoia that had taken hold of them.
The OTS orchestrated these collective suicides in October 1994, using in particular firing systems and gasoline, but the investigations carried out at the time showed that half of the dead people were shot in cold blood, like the journalist of the “Journal de Québec” Joce-Lyne Grandmaison, who was then in Switzerland.
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The team consulted two coroner’s reports – those of the dramas of Morin-Heights in 1994 and Saint-Casimir in 1997 – as well as the 200-page document relating the investigation by the Swiss authorities after the dramas that occurred in Cheiry and Salvan.
Several Quebecers who have lost loved ones also testify in the documentary series, including Joane Cadorette, sister of Carole Cadorette who was in the entourage of Di Mambro and Jouret, as well as her sons François and Réjean Labrèche.
“Murder or suicide, the answer is both. And several Quebecers, unfortunately, had a much less sweet end than some other members of the OTS, because they were considered traitors, because they wanted to get out of the sect. They were coldly murdered as if they had been part of the mafia,” said Sophie Charest, referring in particular to what happened to Robert Ostiguy, mayor of Richelieu in Montérégie, and his wife, Françoise Asselin-Ostigny, who wanted both recover the money lent to the sect. Their son Sylvain is interviewed in the series.
The first two episodes shown to journalists, out of the six available on Vrai on Tuesday, are well done. The original music of Thomas Augustin, from the group Malajube, adds to the ambient malaise. Abundant archival images and reconstructions allow us to discover all the horror of this story, and the series was able to benefit from the material amassed by a French team which was carrying out its own project in parallel. We see police officers and a medical examiner still scarred decades later by what they saw.
Jean-François Poisson admits that the series does not “fix everything” and that there remain “fuzzy areas”. “Even the police did not understand everything,” he said in an interview with the QMI Agency. However, he is proud to share for the first time the confidences of the Swiss conductor Michel Tabachnik, who was presented for a time as the third presumed guru of the OTS.
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The other episodes show that there are still people today who try to recruit and indoctrinate other people in order to rob them of their money or take advantage of them.
“At first, we were starting to explore with a view to making a series on gurus, more contemporary sectarian movements. There are many in the Laurentians. Now it’s no longer esotericism, it’s alternative medicine, yoga and life coaches. Throughout the series, we draw parallels with today, showing that there are people who are still being taken on board. They are not enlightened, they can be in distress or looking for something.
“No one is immune,” added the director, even less when a global pandemic has been stretching for almost two years.
Reference-www.tvanouvelles.ca