Opening his manslaughter trial, Serge Bromberg, a famous film collector and restorer, admitted his “guilt” in Créteil on Tuesday, after a deadly fire in a building caused by a large stockpile of nitrate reels he was storing there.
Stored without authorization under an uninhabited eight-story building in Vincennes, near Paris in the Val-de-Marne, these cinematographic reels, old and potentially dangerous because they are flammable, caught fire on the night of August 10, 2020, in the midst of a wave of hot.
Two people died in the fire
Two people died in the very violent fire that the firefighters put out after six hours of fighting. “I made a mistake,” admitted Serge Bromberg before the criminal court on Tuesday morning.
The former artistic director of the Annecy Animation Film Festival kept the reels of his company, Lobster Films, which specializes in the preservation, restoration and distribution of old films, in this room.
An unsuitable room
These nitrate films were stored in a room with no air conditioning, no fire alarm, near a glass roof. A “firebreak” wall had been installed, but in fact it was not equipped with thermal insulation. It melted in 30 minutes.
Investigators estimate that at the time of the fire between 1364 and 1935 there were coils weighing between 2.5 and 3.6 tons. The defendant makes a different calculation: 965 reels, 970 kilos. “It’s a fact, not an estimate,” he said at the helm.
“This place was a ‘buffer stock’, it just had to house a few reels before they went to the CNC,” defended the animator and producer, fully aware of the risks inherent in nitrate.
“Major Misjudgment”
While recognizing “a very serious error of judgement” and “negligence” on his part, the defendant, 61, believes that the National Center for Cinema and the Moving Image had an obligation to recover and store its reels of nitrate. “The amount of nitrate had to be extremely minimal” in his room, he explained, adding, “Never before has the CNC refused me reels.”
“The fact that a site in the middle of the countryside, a disused farmhouse, could be used, hasn’t it crossed your mind? asked the presiding judge. “It was certainly a fault, an error, an imprudence,” replied the interested party, in front of a room where the victims and the plaintiffs flocked in large numbers.
The trial will be held until Wednesday.
