May 13th, 1993, 9:30AM. A masked man bursts into an infants’ classroom. He takes the children hostage and demands an exorbitant ransom. Based on taped interviews with those involved in the drama and using archive footage shot by firemen, police and the media during the hostage crisis, this documentary drama recounts in factual detail the events during the ensuing 48-hour siege. It started like any other school day. Laurence, the teacher, was beginning her infants’ class in Neuilly-sur-Seine, the Paris suburb where Nicolas Sarkozy was Mayor at the time. Then a masked man burst into the room, threatening to blow up the 21 children with the explosives stuffed in his bag He held out a piece of paper informing the class they’d been taken hos t age and setting out his extravagant ransom demands. He called himself H.B. the “Human Bomb” who unleashed every parent’s nightmare in a two-day reign of terror which gripped France.
