13 de noviembre: Atentados en París

Well not just about that - it is about human survival, it is about sacrifice and it is about decent people helping others in need. It is about shock and it is about disbelief and it is about what some of the people who survived remember of that fateful night. As mini series documentary this works quite nicely and makes sense overall.

There are a lot of people involved and you should find yourself feeling what those impacted felt too. It's not easy to watch as you can imagine and one can only hope this does not happen to anybody. Important documentary and really sad and life affirming at the same time

The events in Paris were just news stories to me, incomprehensible really, as I didn't know the places they happened, and news channels whilst no doubt they would have binged on an event like this, they move on so quickly to the next awful thing that there is no emotional impact and never a sense of the lives ruined and altered permanently.

In this three parter, there was no rushed moving on, and no "cat on a skateboard" at the end, before the weather a la TV news. Instead, there were everyday people who saw things that no one should see, and professionals who dealt with cascading crises such that they could never have expected, all described this terrible night with calm, grace and great humility.

The depth of emotion, the lyrical and insightful ways in which some of the survivors describe their experience really struck me, for example Valerie in Ep3 when she reflects on whether or not she would agree to having the memories removed from her consciousness, if this were possible. She said no, her reasons for saying no demonstrate to me why these people, and Paris operate in a different universe to the mindless killers that tried to take it from them.

At this moment I finished this mini Tvserie on Netflix. And while I am typing this I smoke a cigarette because it feels so surreal to have seen this horror. My thoughts go out to the victims on this black day in the history of Paris.

I haven't seen anything in a while that would keep me so engaged that I wouldn't look at my phone once. I sat three hours straight without moving, glued to the couch, absolutely shocked and frozen. This docuseries made me feel like I was there at the night of terror in Paris. Seeing the events through the eyes of the survivors was almost unbearably powerful. Very tough documentary but I recommend to watch it. I will probably have to watch it again to process everything fully, but I'm completely speechless. Thank you for making it and letting us see what it was like to be there, because when you read it in the papers it's just another news that you are shocked by but once you turn the pages you kind of forget about it. This documentary will always help me to remember.

Had to stop watching quite a few times to wipe tears from my eyes. The scale of the attack is incredible and much bigger than I knew. What the survivors experienced is unimaginable and we owe it to ourselves to watch this to understand the real impacts of terrorism.