Midnight Express in Siberia. A gripping contemporary story of escape.
 
“The scene unfolds not far from Lake Baikal, where I live and love and am lucky enough to be loved, in Irkutsk, the capital of eastern Siberia. It’s morning, men in balaclavas appear out of nowhere. My daughter screams. She’s five years old. I’m arrested right in front of her, then beaten – expertly – and interrogated. Worst of all I’m branded with that ignominious word I struggle to commit to paper: paedophile. These men hidden behind balaclavas and shadows want my skin. They have set in motion an implacable and brutish process of destruction that has a name, a name I know, invented by the KGB: Kompromat.
Inside Siberia’s prisons, I try to understand. In the psychiatric hospital where I’m later interned, I try to understand. I’m guaranteed fifteen years of a gruelling camp. The story of my escapes can begin.  
Naming the people and places doesn’t matter much. I haven’t invented anything. It’s a film, but it isn’t. It’s a novel, but it isn’t.   What matters is the beautiful turning point when literature makes life more interesting than literature; what I must do is grasp it like a dagger. The baying wolfpack pursuing me were afraid this would all end up in a book. Here it is.”
 
Born in 1978, Yoann Barbereau worked in Russia for over ten years, including running the Alliance française in Irkutsk.
To escape his captors, he used every modern method available, outmanoeuvring the signals from his electronic tag and travelling hundreds of kilometres across Siberia using the carpool app BlaBlaCar and then on foot. His story will be brought to the big screen by Jérôme Salle, the director of Zulu.