As Bestas, the latest film by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, has just been awarded the César 2023 for best foreign film. "A well-deserved recognition", comments Jérôme Ferret, a sociologist at the Institute of Law of Space, Territories, Culture and Communication (IDETCOM) and deputy director of the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme et de la Société de Toulouse (CNRS), who was able to spend ten days on the set of the film in September 2021. On the ground, the researcher from Toulouse was able to observe the filmmaker's work and understand "how he films violence".
 

Violence, both social and political, is at the heart of Jérôme Ferret's research."The sociologist's job is to analyse what causes this violence to be expressed, to persist and to reproduce itself. It is both a scientific and democratic project," he explains. But when you work on such a topic, you sometimes come up against a problem of access to data.
This is why the professor looked at the cinematographic work of Rodrigo Sorogoyen, which is "very interesting sociological material". It offers a unique vision of the different forms of violence in contemporary Spanish society and "awakens a certain number of blind spots in the sociologist" in his work.

In October 2021, Jérôme Ferret published an article dedicated to the Spanish filmmaker in the English journal Violence : an international journal published by Sage Media Collection Publication. Entitled "I'm a sociologist too, right? Cinema and the representation of contemporary violence in Spain", it consists of an analytical part based on several films by Rodrigo Sorogoyen and an in-depth interview conducted on the set of As Bestas, in September 2021. During this exchange, the director spoke about his career, his grandfather as a filmmaker, his training, his influences and his conception of violence.
 

One year later, in October 2022, the IDETCOM sociologist had the opportunity to interview Rodrigo Sorogoyen again during a conference-debate organised by the Cinémathèque de Toulouse in the framework of Cinespaña. With Loïc Diaz, one of the directors of Cinespaña and a historian of Spanish cinema, and Franck Loiret, director of the Toulouse Cinémathèque and an expert in cinema and editing, Jérôme Ferret led the debate by shedding a more sociological light on the work of the Spanish filmmaker.

 

     

Jérôme Ferret is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Toulouse Capitole, IDETCOM laboratory, with HDR obtained at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), (guarantor Michel Wieviorka) and deputy director of the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme et de la Société de Toulouse (MSHS-T, UAR 3414 CNRS). He is the scientific co-director of the RadiRégu (Radicalités et Régulations) expertise platform, a Toulouse centre of expertise on radical phenomena and their regulation. His research work focuses on social and political violence.

He has published some 30 articles in international journals such as Policing and Society, British Journal of Criminology, International Review of Sociology, The American Sociologist et Current Sociology and with Farhad Khosrokhavar Family and Jihadism. A Socio-Anthropological Approach to the French Experience, Routledge (2021).