In short, they were forcing him to make a deal with the enemy, which to him was like delivering himself up to those behemoths with his hands and feet tied. He was aware that this was increasingly common across the whole industry, as if joining forces with an American platform was enough to guarantee you would benefit from their millions of subscribers. The practice of releasing films in the cinema was seen as old hat. Knowing that every time you had to pray that ticket sales were high enough from the first showing on Wednesday morning, that the weather was favourable that day – not too nice but not rainy either – and all of that for some tens of thousands of spectators. The new generation of producers found that outdated; for them it was the cinema of the past, it was cumbersome and too risky.

Franck had an image of Amazon and Netflix as two predators with an infinite appetite, a thousand times bigger than everyone else, two super-predators that regulated the ecosystem like wolves by first getting rid of the weakest, smallest, most vulnerable prey, before establishing themselves as the absolute masters of the game. Liem and Travis didn’t realise that, in this game, everybody would be eaten up, with the big digital platforms pretending they needed the experience of French producers when actually it was just a trick to swallow them up more easily.

The old Land Rover remained parked, motor running, but nobody got out. You couldn’t see the driver’s face, which was in shadow. Eventually, the left-hand door opened and a man of about thirty got out wearing cargo trousers and an army T-shirt. Another man who was much older and also wearing cargo trousers walked up to him. They shook hands and stood there, smoking fags and talking, leaning against the side of the vehicle, paying no attention to the dogs. Inside their cages, they seemed calm. Without even really deciding to, Franck turned off his computer, crossed the room, went outside and over to the two guys on the pavement opposite. He started talking to them, out of the blue, about the dogs.

‘They’re beautiful!’

This choice of adjective seemed to surprise them. Or else it was the fact that a stranger, a tourist, was speaking to them. Either way, they took a moment before responding. Then the driver turned to the cages and replied, ‘Beautiful? If you say so. More importantly, they’re tough …’

‘Are they hunting dogs?’

‘No, that one’s a Rhodesian ridgeback and that one’s a Hanover hound.’

‘So they are hunting dogs?’

‘No, they’re blood-tracking dogs.’