By Adem Lazreg
« Sursis » A film by Walid Tayaâ
Sursis (سُرْسِي de Walid Tayaâ, 28’, 2025 ) opens with this jolt: actors sitting in chairs, breathing too hard, looking like they’re being recorded for a podcast but clearly carrying something heavier than whatever a podcast interview usually demands. It feels off from the first second. The music is too distorted. The scenes are too intimate, too exposed. You can sense panic in the room, even though you don’t know yet what they’re about to tell you. Then the stories start. And there are no actors present, the film is a bunch of testimonies about police abuse, one after another. They sound like the kind of things you’d hear in a documentary, those confessions you feel responsible for listening to. And you do listen. You brace yourself for each one. You try to be present. And once you’ve settled into that rhythm, the film throws the curveball: only one of these accounts belongs to someone who actually lived it. The rest are constructed, performed, fragments of other stories stitched together.
That revelation forces you into a different kind of discomfort. You’re suddenly aware of how quickly you believed everything, how much trust you automatically gave the form. And you start asking questions, not out of hostility, but because the film leaves you no choice : Why present this in a festival? What is the filmmaker actually trying to do with this mixture of truth and fabrication? And here’s where the film gets under the skin. It understands ragebait culture inside-out, how stories of injustice spread, how easily we accept them when they match the world we think we know. It manipulates that instinct, deliberately, almost coldly. It wants to trigger you. It wants you to feel played. It wants you to get angry, not just at the police, not just at the storytellers, but at your own reflexes.
But the provocation isn’t empty. It’s not some loud shock meant to go viral. The film is digging into something bigger, uglier, more structural: our hunger for authenticity and how we consume trauma like entertainment. Sursis keeps pulling the rug because it wants you to see the rug, the floor, the air beneath it…Everything. And beneath all of that, something quieter but far more important is happening.
The film is also telling you that the violence itself is real. Not these specific words, not this exact performance, but the humiliation, the terror, the imbalance of power. Those things aren’t fiction at all. They come from a world that produces these stories over and over again. It’s basically saying that if you’re upset some of these testimonies are fabricated, you’re missing the real horror. The world has already supplied countless real versions. Somewhere, someone lived exactly this, or close enough that the line between real and invented stops mattering. Police brutality doesn’t need verification to exist; it already exists, constantly, documented or not. So when the film blurs the line between genuine and performed testimony, it isn’t diluting reality. It’s refusing to let you escape it. It’s saying that all these stories did happen, maybe not to these actors or in this room, but in streets, stations, detention centers, and back alleys you will never see. The brutality is real whether or not the scene you’re watching is a reenactment.
There’s almost an accusation in that. The film seems to look at us and ask why we’re so preoccupied with authenticity in this specific context. Are we truly worried about accuracy, or are we reaching for a loophole that lets us distance ourselves from what the film is forcing us to confront?
This is what connects Sursis to the lineage of confrontational filmmakers, not the style but the intention. They all use discomfort as a tool to break the passive relationship audiences have with stories. They close the distance, they corner you, they make you sit with the parts of the world we pretend not to notice.
And maybe that is why Sursis belongs in a festival. Festivals are one of the few spaces where a film doesn’t have to be neat or polite or “balanced.” A festival allows the audience to sit with something unresolved, even contradictory. It encourages debate, tension, confusion, instead of funneling everything into a digestible moral takeaway. Sursis demands that kind of space. The film is about police abuse and how we listen to stories of police abuse, how we validate them, how we sometimes only believe what has been packaged in the right format. It’s about the way trauma becomes content and the way audiences consume that content without realizing what that consumption means.
In the end, the film belongs where people are forced to pay attention. Where discomfort can’t be skipped with a swipe. Where unresolved questions don’t get buried under comments. Sursis refuses closure, and it wants us to refuse it too. Because the violence behind these stories is not fiction. It is a living reality, and the film makes sure you cannot forget that, no matter how constructed some of the stories might be.
