THE “WORLD” OPINION – NOT TO BE MISSED
A spy film, a tense thriller, without stylistic effects or untimely exploitation of the genre’s ordinary and easy codes, Jonathan Millet’s first feature film plays with the nerves. With simplicity, at least in appearance, drawing its strength from the reality that inspired the film, and from the material that it carries, concentrated entirely on a character whose story and journey count for thousands of others. Hamid (Adam Bessa) is a survivor of the military prison of Saidnaya, near Damascus – the deadliest of the regime of Bashar Al-Assad.
We discover the young man in 2016 in Strasbourg, a town on the border with Germany, where he has been granted refugee status. His presence in France is the result of a missionary necessity: to find his former tormentor whose face is unknown to him, since his own, during the interrogations, was covered with a bag. A hazardous, almost illusory quest to which Hamid nevertheless remains glued, clinging like a castaway to his raft. The film too. Which does not let go of him, following each of his movements, fixing his deep gaze, alert, attentive to the most minor details, and which, to us, escape.
This gaze absorbs us, becomes ours, gives form to ghosts, puts into perspective what, in short, is at work in the cinema. An eye that behind the camera forces us to adopt its point of view, to follow what it designates, to decipher the areas it illuminates.
Read the review Article reserved for our subscribers Cannes 2024 “Ghosts”, a sensory thriller about the hunt for a Syrian war criminal
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The hero of Jonathan Millet’s feature film – the film chosen to open the Cannes Film Festival’s Critics’ Week in May – becomes absorbed in this task. Which becomes his reason for being, the promise of his salvation. Like a mourning that cannot be done over the death of a loved one whose body has never been found, Hamid’s future remains deprived of a horizon as long as the torturer he is pursuing has not been identified.
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The discreet gait and restraint that govern the film match the rhythm of its character, making one feel a total presence to what is overwhelming him. This intensity is due to the actor Adam Bessa, whose gravity, dark, almost painful interiority, give the measure of the stakes, and the peril that it entails. At Cannes, the actor was awarded the Best Performance Prize for his role in another film (presented at Un Certain Regard): Case (2022), by Lotfy Nathan.
This intensity is also due to the career of director Jonathan Millet, who has traveled and filmed around fifty countries in the Middle East, South America and Africa, and lived in Syria, in Aleppo, where he learned Arabic. From these experiences he has drawn several documentary films, all of which tell the story of exile through powerful individual stories: And we will always walk (2017), on the invisibility of undocumented immigrants; Ceuta, sweet prisonproduced with Loïc H. Rechi (2012), which follows the trajectory of five migrants; Disappearance (2020), filmed in the Amazon, depicting Amadeo, the last of the men to speak Taushiro and whose end is near.
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