Is Dossier 137 based on a true story? The protest injury at its core happened to real people more than once
Dominik Moll's thriller follows one fictional flash-ball case through France's police of the police. The statistics behind it are not fictional at all.
The case is invented, and the wound isn't. Dossier 137 (released in the US as Case 137) follows Stéphanie Bertrand (Léa Drucker), an investigator with the IGPN — France's internal police inspectorate — assigned to find who fired the flash-ball round that maimed a young protester during the 2018 yellow vest demonstrations. No single real file matches the movie's; the injury type has an entire documented casefile of its own.
The numbers from the protest period, compiled by The Local from government, press, and activist counts:
- 1,700 injured over the first 11 weeks by the government's own count; activist group Désarmons-les put it at 2,000 to 3,000.
- Around 15 serious eye injuries, including permanent sight loss, attributed to rubber projectiles; 51 flash-ball victims came forward after a single France Info appeal.
- Four people lost part of a hand to grenades.
- 101 IGPN investigations opened into protest injuries — with not one officer reprimanded at the time of that count.
- 353 people injured directly by police action, per journalist David Dufresne's independent tally.
Some of those cases have names. Jérôme Rodrigues, one of the movement's visible figures, lost the use of an eye during a Paris protest in January 2019; Vanessa Langard told reporters a "defence bullet" to the face took about three quarters of her vision.
How Moll built the fiction on top
Moll and co-writer Gilles Marchand didn't adapt one case; they embedded with the system that processes all of them. Moll spent days inside the IGPN watching investigators work, met lawyers from both sides, and sat down with a family whose son, in his words, "had been severely wounded by a shot."
"I also joined the police during a demonstration; I wore a helmet and everything."
— Dominik Moll, to Film Talk
The access came with surprising slack. "They never asked me to read the screenplay," Moll said of the IGPN in the same interview — a unit he notes had never before been the subject of a film, a book, or a novel.
France's police watchdog opened 101 investigations into protest injuries. The first feature film about that watchdog is the fictional 102nd.
Where to see it, and what it's won
The film premiered in the main competition at Cannes in May 2025 and opened in France that November. Drucker's performance collected the César and Lumière awards for Best Actress, the film sits at 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, and Film Movement brings it to US theaters this month.
One real-world footnote followed the film to the festival: Cannes barred actor Théo Navarro-Mussy from the red carpet over rape allegations, a decision made with the producers' agreement. Moll said he understood the decision.
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