by Paul Cudenec

In a previous phase of my existence I used to pen regular film reviews for the local paper at which I worked.

I got into the habit of writing these as soon as possible after I had seen the film in question, so that I would still be in touch with the impression that it had made on me and remember the salient details.

So it’s somewhat surprising for me to realise that I have taken several weeks to write about the film I am going to describe.

What has happened, I think, is that it made a very deep impression on me that I have needed time to fully process.

Les Survivantes (‘the female survivors’, literally, or perhaps better rendered as ‘the women who survived’) is a new French documentary from director Pierre Barnérias, known for his 2020 exposé of the Covid scam, Hold-Up.

Given the vitriol and censorship aimed at that film, and given the even more controversial subject matter of Les Survivantes, I would have expected only to have been able to view it via some rebellious non-corporate website.

So it was a little surreal to find myself sitting down to watch it at a massive multiplex cinema in an out-of-town commercial zone in Nîmes.

The subject of the film is the abuse of children: not just sexual abuse, including violent rape, but also the torture of children, the dismembering and murdering of children and the forcing of children to watch and participate in the abuse, torture, dismembering and murdering of other children.

It has taken me a month to be able even to write that sentence, so it is hard to imagine how difficult it must have been for the survivors of such activity to talk in public about what they experienced.

Indeed, as one of them explained, part of the purpose of the activity – in particular the forced participation – was to traumatise and shame them into a lifelong silence that these women have now broken.

An important aspect of the film is that these crimes were not carried out by random individuals but by a network – when they met up, some of the eight women realised they had been abused by the same individuals in different locations across France, Belgium and Switzerland.

As the survivors told their stories, the nature of this network became increasingly apparent – there was talk of powerful people, politicians, heads of state and billionaires.

A former employee of Crédit Suisse (which cropped up in my recent article on the Rothschilds’ Chatham House operation) described how he had walked out of a party hosted by his banker boss when it started to involve a simulated satanic child sacrifice involving the banker’s daughter.

Just in case there was any lingering doubt, the caption at the end of the film refers to the network being run by “global financial power”.

We have, of course, all heard about Jeffrey Epstein or Jimmy Savile, with dark rumours about activities even less acceptable than sex with underage girls and boys.

But I for one never wanted to think about this too much, didn’t really want to emotionally embrace its reality, even though I accepted it intellectually.

Les Survivantes forced me to think about it, to feel it through the words of little girls who had suffered, survived and somehow found the courage, as women, to tell the world what had happened.

I know I was not the only person who walked out of the cinema desperately suppressing the desire to burst into angry tears.

In the subsequent weeks, the shock of what was described in the film has percolated into my thinking.

I thought I was being pretty hard-line in the language I use to describe the circles involved in all this, using labels like “criminocrats” or “mafia” and adjectives like “corrupt”, “odious” or “vile”.

However, I now realise I have been letting them off the hook. They’re worse than any of that.

It is already difficult to understand how anyone could deliberately cause the deaths of millions of people in wars, deliberately poison them with toxic drugs, deliberately destroy the natural world, polluting land, air and water, deliberately wreck communities and cultures, cynically enslave and exploit people across the world.

But how can we digest the fact that members of this same global financial power also enjoy raping, torturing, dismembering and murdering little children?

What words can we use to describe what they are? Even “Satanist”, which is presumably how they regard themselves, seems too weak.

I’ve always thought that mere human beings can no more be entirely evil than they can be entirely good.

Now I’m not so sure.

[Audio version]

The three pieces of art illustrating this article are all by the film director David Lynch.