Les Âmes perdues

Stéphane Malterre, director and co-author of Les ÂMES PERDUES, is a French director and journalist. With a master's degree in language sciences, he first worked as a print journalist and literary and film critic. For fifteen years a major reporter, and editor-in-chief, for an audiovisual news agency, he wrote, filmed and directed more than twenty investigative reports and documentaries (Canal Plus, France 2, Arte, M6.) Over the years, he investigated political and financial scandals, international arms trafficking, conflicts in Africa (Ivory Coast, DRC), and covered the Arab Springs (Tunisia, Libya, Syria). Among his achievements: JACQUES CHIRAC: LA JUSTICE AUX TROUSSES (80 min), SYRIA, LA MORT EN FACE (65 min, selected in 2013 for the Bayeux Calvados-Normandie War Correspondents Award). In 2016, his creative documentary, IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER, THE SON AND THE JIHAD (115 min), which he shot over three years in Syria, was selected in about fifteen international festivals (FIPA, Hot Docs, IDFA, The Viennale...)

Garance Le Caisne is a freelance writer and journalist, specializing in the Middle East and memory issues. She lived in Egypt for eight years, reporting on the region before taking an interest in the French suburbs and Islam in France. In 2010-2011, she returned to the Arab world during the revolutions. Since then, she has been covering Syria in particular in order to understand, through the crimes of the regime, how to survive torture and enforced disappearance, to regain control of one's life and history. She publishes reports on war medicine in Syria, the destruction of cities and chemical attacks, she co-directs the documentary SYRIA: TEMOINS A CHARGE (France 5, Al Jazeera, 2016). Translated into ten languages, her book OPERATION CESAR: AU CŒUR DE LA MACHINE DE MORT SYRIENNE (Stock, 2015) received the German Geschwister-Scholl-Preis in 2016. In 2022, she published OUBLIE TON NOM : MAZEN AL-HAMADA, MEMOIRES D'UN DISPARU (Stock), which tells the story of one of the characters in LES ÂMES PERDUES, placing him in the lineage of the survivors of the Gulag or the concentration camps.