The face of a Syrian refugee is the enigmatic key to this slow-burning drama-thriller, the fiction feature debut of French film-maker Jonathan Millet; it is hard, blank, withdrawn, yet showing us an inexpressible agony, a suppressed, unprocessed trauma, complicated by what is evidently a new strategic wariness. The refugee is Hamid (played by Adam Bessa), a former literature professor from Aleppo who is now in Strasbourg in France in 2016, having suffered torture in Damascus’s notorious Sednaya prison, and the killing of his wife and infant daughter.
Hamid asks expatriate Syrians if they know a certain man, showing them a hazy photograph, claiming that this is his cousin. In fact, it is a man who tortured him and Hamid is a member of a ring dedicated to tracking down Syrian war criminals all over Europe. Haunted, exhausted and unhappy, Hamid’s only real relationship is with his elderly mother in a Lebanese refugee camp, with whom he has weekly Zoom calls; this a tender performance from Shafiqa El Till.
