Sabrina Van Tassel Biography
Sabrina Van Tassel is a French-American director and a journalist living in France. As an investigative reporter for French TV, she has directed over 40 documentary films since 2004 for major television documentary programs. Focusing mainly on social matters, such as under age sex trafficking, children in the white nationalist movement and school bullying.
Simultaneously, she has been directing feature documentaries: "Married for Worse" (2004) exploring the world of two young women forced into marriage, "Shalom India: Tsahal's Lost Soldiers" (2008) about young Israeli soldiers, recently discharged from the army, who go to India for their "big trip", and "Rivka's Tribe" (2010) the amazing tale of six brothers and sisters surviving the Holocaust in France.
"The Silenced Walls" (2015) is her first documentary theatrically released. It was critically acclaimed by the French press. It tells her journey to discover the history of the Drancy camp, the biggest internment camp in France, where the majority of French Jews were detained before being deported to the death camps during the Second World War. "I discovered that the Drancy Camp still existed while filming my previous documentary "Rivka's Tribe".
I was convinced that it had been destroyed more than half a century ago. When I got there, I was overwhelmed to see that the old camp intact and that people were living in this pace haunted by grief." Her quest for answers lasted three years.
