“The Ghosts”, a thrilling sensory thriller about the hunt for Syrian war criminals

Jonathan Millet’s first feature-length fiction film opened Critics’ Week, the Cannes selection dedicated to new talents. Inspired by real events, “The Ghosts” follows Hamid, played by Franco-Tunisian actor Adam Bessa, a Syrian exile on the trail of his former tormentor.

It’s a big gap that Cannes has the secret of: moving seamlessly from the glitter and glamorous photos of the red carpet to reality at its most violent and brutal. The opening film of Critics’ Week, a selection which highlights young cinema talents, enters head-on into the recent history of the war in Syria. Started in 2011, the conflict left several hundred thousand dead and millions displaced. It is a handful of them that Jonathan Millet’s first feature-length fiction film focuses on. The 38-year-old director, who comes from documentaries, has imagined a gripping thriller. A fiction to better express reality.

The ghosts was born from long investigative work on the cells of Syrian exiles responsible for flushing out the war criminals of the Bashar Al-Assad regime and Daesh who have tried to be forgotten in Europe. “I spent a year researching the cells, meeting certain members, listening to spinning stories, explains Jonathan Millet. It’s this mass of information that allowed me to create my characters.”

In the title role, Adam Bessa, sober and powerful, plays a father who has lost everything. A man haunted by torture and the horror of war, torn between his thirst for justice and the temptation of the worst. In the streets of Strasbourg, he tirelessly tracks down a man of whom he only has a blurry photo, his former jailer in the military prison of Saidnaya, in Syria. A risky manhunt as the clues are thin and the investigator is on the edge.

These underground networks led by shadowy citizens really existed and notably enabled the arrest in 2019 of Abou Hamza, a former official of the Islamic State. The press paid little attention to it.

The characteristic smell of the executioner, the scent of jasmine in the streets of Damascus, the sound of the executioner’s footsteps in Saidnaya prison, The ghosts gives an essential place to sensoriality. A choice which again results from testimonies collected by the director. “In Bashar’s prisons, we are in the dark, so it is our hearing and sense of smell that develop, he explains. We try to hear the executioner’s footsteps, we use touch to know where we are in the prison. All this reminds me of cinema and constitutes powerful material for telling reality.”

The music, sometimes loud to the point of obsession, expresses Hamid’s inner turmoil. Jonathan Millet leaves all overly significant images off-camera. Torture, murdered children and spouses, even the hero’s scars will only be suggested.

Once safe, what remains of these past traumas, how to deal with these invasive and haunting nightmares? What to do with this pain embedded in the pulpit? Through Hamid’s destiny, the unique story of each exile is highlighted. This long process of reconstruction whose outcome is never certain.

“What I look for when I write, without omitting anything of the harshness of these realities, is a place of light, of possible hope. Whether this hope materializes or not, it becomes the movement of the film. I do not don’t believe in drama with no way out, in leaden situations from which we cannot escape.”

Jonathan Millet

director

Gender : Drama
Director: Jonathan Millet
Actors: Adam Bessa, Tawkeek Barhom, Julia Franz Richter
Country : France
Duration : 1h46
Exit : July 3, 2024