The Staircase director's new French crime series is coming to the BBC

Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind docuseries The Staircase has made another crime thriller based on true events and it's coming to the BBC in the UK.

Lestrade's 2004 Netflix documentary The Staircase looked into the case of Michael Peterson and the suspicious death of his wife, Kathleen, after she was found dead at the bottom of the stairs of their sprawling North Carolina family home. Now, the filmmaker brings us Sambre – Anatomy of a Crime , a French crime thriller that recounts the extraordinary legal case of a serial rapist who attacked women across three decades in the same location.

Following the success of The Staircase , which inspired a 2022 HBO Max and Sky drama also called The Staircase , starring Colin Firth and Toni Collette, Sambre – Anatomy of a Crime will be set in Northern France in the late 1980’s when women were being sexually assaulted along the same road by the Sambre river – with attacks taking place early mornings and in a similar style.

Created and written by Alice Géraud and Marc Herpoux, the six-part series, which will be available to BBC iPlayer and BBC TV channels, sees Jean-Xavier de Lestrade take on directing duties.

An official press release for the show reads: "As the police fail to get to grips with the extent of these assaults or make a connection between the cases, the justice system is overwhelmed by the accumulating cases. It will take 30 years to catch a man, who never stopped attacking women and is responsible for at least 54 cases of rape or sexual assault. Sambre – Anatomy of a Crime is a thriller following the progression of the investigation and its repercussions from the 80s through to 2018."

The cast will include Alix Poisson (T he returned, Six Women ), Clémence Poesy ( The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon, Tenet ), Olivier Gourmet ( Oussekine, La Promesse ), Noémie Lvovsky ( Camille Rewinds, Farewell, My Queen ), Jonathan Turnbull ( Soldiers ) and Pauline Parigot (Soldiers, HPI ).

Sue Deeks, Head of BBC Programme Acquisition says: “ Sambre – Anatomy of a Crime is an absorbing series about France’s most notorious sexual predator, and of how he was allowed to slip through the cracks of the judicial system for over 30 years.

"Each episode is told from the perspective of a different character involved in the case – a victim, the judge, the mayor, the scientist, the police officer and finally, the perpetrator, and is a gripping examination of the flaws of a society and its institutions”.