"The Patriarch, the drug guru", Canal+ Docs: investigation into the sectarian excesses of the "multinational detoxification company"

CANAL+ DOCS – ON DEMAND – DOCUMENTARY SERIES

Drugs, money, sex, twists and turns: all the ingredients of a good saga are there. And yet, this is reality, and the most sordid. The four-part documentary series written by Léa Barracco and directed with Christophe Astruc is a shock. It's a dive into the shady workings of the Patriarche association, known for having come to the aid of thousands of young heroin addicts since the 1970s in an atmosphere halfway between a hippie community and a reform school.

"I've worked extensively on sects, particularly Raël, and on the phenomena of influence," says Léa Barracco. "Yet I'd never heard of the Patriarch. It stunned me to discover its scale, and also that most of the witnesses had never been contacted." This is one of the strengths of this investigation. Like in a thriller, heavyweights of the system and key witnesses confess. And victims with chilling stories come out of silence.

Created by Joseph, known as "Lucien", Engelmajer (1920-2007) with the utopia of returning to a healthy life while French society was throwing itself headlong into consumerism, the association opened its first "refuge" at the La Boère estate, in Saint-Paul-sur-Save (Haute-Garonne), in 1972, then, in the same department, that of La Mothe, in Saint-Cézert, before becoming in the mid-1980s a very rich "multinational detox" present on four continents.

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