Libération reported that Ly was convicted in 2009 of complicity in a kidnapping and sequestration case, for which he received a 3-year sentence. Ly unsuccessfully appealed the ruling in 2012 and served a reduced 2-year prison sentence. The article confirmed that Ladj Ly was convicted of two earlier offenses as well: The first, dating back to 2011, involved a video of police violence in Montfermeil that Ly posted online and to which he added "outrageous commentary." The director received a six-month suspended sentence and a EUR400 ($445) fine. The second was from 2012, when Ly was condemned for "verbal assault and violence against a public official," in this case the mayor of Montfermeil Xavier Lemoine, who Ly and others verbally attacked. [Hollywood Reporter, Dec. 2019].

[press conference for Les Misérables (2019) at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival] The starting point of course of this project was a police blunder that I filmed ten years ago. For five years, I filmed scenes in my neighbourhood - we filmed the cops - it was a neighbourhood where a lot of things happened and I started to film the cops and then I actually filmed a cop blunder, and I had a video therefore. We talked with our collective group and we decided to disseminate the video. After a police enquiry, the press latched onto the video and the policeman was suspended. A few years later I decided to turn it into The Pitiful (2017), which was my first short film. I'd been wanting for quite some time to do a short - for about ten years I'd been thinking of the idea. It's quite complicated to do a feature film of course, it wasn't an easy matter, we had a very small budget but we did manage to do it. So that was the starting point; I started by making a short and as it was so very successful - we were selected for any number of festivals and got about 30 awards - so I felt that the time was right to do my first feature film which bears the same name, Les Misérables.