Cannes Critics’ Week Opener ‘Ghost Trail’ Pays Tribute to the Quest of Syrian War Refugees – Watch Clip (EXCLUSIVE)
French director Jonathan Millet riffs on manhunt tropes in “Ghost Trail,” the psychological thriller that will be the Cannes Critics’ Week opener.
Variety has been given an exclusive first-look clip from the film, which is inspired by real-life events.
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“Ghost Trail” is the story of a Syrian man named Hamid who is part of a secret group pursuing fugitive leaders that perpetrated horrors in the name of the Syrian regime during the country’s civil war.
His mission takes him to France, on the trail of his former torturer. And he manages to tracks him down, as it appears from the clip.
“But with his judgment clouded by pressure, doubt and revenge, can he be certain of the righteousness of his own actions?” the synopsis reads.
Millet, who previously co-directed doc “Ceuta, Douce Prison” – about five migrants who leave their lands to try their luck in Europe and end up in an open-air prison in Morocco – called his new project “the continuation of my work on migration through narrative film and documentary” in promotional materials. “I have kept my bearing; I seek to capture singular individual destinies to explore exile through the perspective of human beings,” the director said.
Millet’s own life is reflected in the film’s script that stems from the fact that he lived a little over a year in Aleppo, Syria when he was 20 and the civil war hadn’t started yet. “A few years later war broke out and my friends in Aleppo would send me the footage they had shot the previous week,” he recalled. “I experienced war and the destruction of our neighborhood through these videos. They fled to Istanbul, where I visited them several times, in the heart of the Syrian community in Turkey, and later to Germany,” Millet added.
“I wanted to make my characters into movie heroes to pay tribute to these stories of exile that I had heard about, and which would make any adventure film screenwriter blanch. What first struck me in these exiles’ quest is how urgent and how modern it is,” the director noted.
Cannes Critics’ Week artistic director Ava Cahen has described “Ghost Trail” as a “thrilling sensory film in which French-Tunisian actor Adam Bessa’s subtlety leaves us breathless.”
Bessa, who plays Hamid, won the best actor award in the 2022 Cannes Un Certain Regard section for his role in U.S.-based director Lotfy Nathan’s “Harka.” “Ghost Trail” also stars Palestinian actor Tawfeek Barhom (“Boy From Heaven”).
“Ghost Trail” is being sold by French arthouse production and distribution giant MK2. It will be distributed in the MENA region by Mad Solutions.
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