Brussels Attacks: The urgency to inform

On 22 March 2016, two coordinated bomb attacks struck Brussels — first Zaventem Airport, then Maelbeek metro station. The city stopped. So did normal broadcasting.

Louis Liégeois was sixteen years old that day, watching events unfold on a screen. A decade later, now a working journalist himself, he returns to the newsrooms that covered the attacks, asking the people who were inside them how they managed — and what it cost them.

The result is a meticulous, hour-by-hour reconstruction of one of Belgian journalism's most demanding days. Reporters and editors from RTBF, La Libre, and Agence France-Presse speak candidly about the decisions they made under pressure: what to publish, what to hold back, how to verify information when rumour was moving faster than fact. The film draws these professionals not as detached professionals but as citizens who were themselves shaken, doing a job that suddenly carried enormous weight.

Directed by Liégeois for Découpages Belgique and RTBF, the documentary belongs to a growing body of work that examines journalism itself as a subject, examining the ethics of real-time reporting during a national emergency. Precise, honest, and quietly affecting, it offers an insider account of what it means to inform when clarity is the first casualty.