“Ghost Trail”, which opened the Critics’ Week sidebar in Cannes this week, follows a Syrian exile’s pursuit of the man who tortured him during the country’s civil war. FRANCE 24 spoke to French director Jonathan Millet, whose impressive Cannes debut delivered one of the festival’s early hits.
Away from the headline-grabbing celebrations of Hollywood titans, discovering bright new talent is, for many moviegoers, the real treat in Cannes. So is cinema’s ability to delve beneath the news cycle, probing the still-open wounds of wars that have been chased away by other, more recent conflicts.
“Ghost Trail”, director Jonathan Millet’s powerful feature-length fiction debut, ticks both boxes. Inspired by real events, it follows a Syrian exile’s efforts to track down the man who tortured him and countless others in Syria’s notorious Sednaya prison, dubbed by activists the “Human Slaughterhouse”.
French-Tunisian actor Adam Bessa delivers a sterling performance as Hamid, a bereaved former professor from Aleppo consumed by grief at the loss of his wife and daughter and yearning for some form of redress. He is part of an underground cell of refugees and activists who hold furtive online chats via a multiplayer videogame, trying to track down Bashar al-Assad’s henchmen hiding in Europe and take them to justice.
The trail takes Hamid to Strasbourg in eastern France, where he becomes convinced his former torturer has assumed the identity of student Sami Hamma, played by an equally terrific Tawfeek Barhom. The trouble is Hamid was blindfolded during his prison beatings and must rely on other senses to recognise his tormentor’s voice, steps or smell.
Hamid’s tailing of Sami soon exposes a gulf in their respective experiences of exile in the West, with the latter blending in just fine whereas the former is held back by trauma. And as the war drags on and Assad clings to power, raising the prospect that justice may never be meted out, Hamid faces an agonising decision over whether to take matters into his own hands.
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More than just a gripping thriller, “Ghost Trail” is also an enthralling and sensitive character study, expertly touching on themes of exile and trauma, which Millet already mined in his earlier documentary work. He spoke to FRANCE 24 about tackling such weighty topics in film and his decision to veer into genre cinema.
You’ve worked on refugees and the subject of exile before. How did you choose this particular story?
The initial plan was to make a documentary on war refugees and trauma. I spent more than two years interviewing people traumatised by the war, listening to their powerful and harrowing accounts of imprisonment, torture and lives shattered. But I couldn’t find a way of filming them, of positioning the camera, that would do justice to their stories. Then I heard about these secret groups tracking down war criminals and was immediately blown away. Their real-life story connected with my desire to make a film that tells a sensory experience about espionage and manhunts.
Is that why you chose fiction, and indeed a genre movie, over documentary?
Fiction seemed to me the best way to convey the power of their stories, to give substance to what they went through in jail. They were in complete darkness, relying only on touch and smell. They recalled how they would sense things, registering their guards’ footsteps and all that. It required a specific type of shots, sounds and editing to try to convey that sensory experience. My aim was to tell their story through a highly subjective point of view, offering a different angle compared to, say, a journalist writing a thoroughly documented piece.
Syria gets very little coverage nowadays, with the media focused on other wars. Can cinema help fill the gap?
The war got a lot of coverage in the first years, then the focus moved to the refugees heading for Europe, and now the media have moved on. Cinema is less bound to this temporality, this immediacy. It is more about finding ways of telling things differently. Having said that, in this particular case we actually worked in step with the news. When I started writing the film, the effort to track down war criminals was still only emerging. We started filming just as the first trials opened in Germany. And when we wrapped up the film, France had just issued an arrest warrant for Assad.
[Editor’s note: in January 2022, a German court sentenced a former Syrian army officer to life in prison for crimes against humanity, in the world's first criminal case brought over state-led torture in Syria.]
Online chats among members of the cell suggest a growing fear that there will be no form of justice. Is this something that transpired from your interviews with refugees?
The reason these secret cells were set up is because Russian and Chinese vetoes at the UN effectively thwarted any type of international intervention. So from the outset, there’s this sense of impunity, this fear that justice will never be handed down. A Syrian refugee told me about his encounter with his former torturer in a Berlin supermarket. He could see that the man had his papers in order, that all was well for him, and that nobody would bother to find out who he really was or take him to justice. That’s why these groups formed, reaching out to lawyers and collecting evidence for future trials.
Another thing that interested me was their dilemma, their fear that if they reported to the authorities the fact that Syrian criminals were among the refugees, then Europe would close its borders.
The characters in your film are each at very different stages of their integration – a discrepancy you’ve explored before in your documentary work. Was it important for you to continue this thread in your fiction?
From the start, my films have told stories of exile, of detention camps, migration routes and arrival in a foreign country. My aim has always been to tell individual stories, to go beyond abstract figures, showing how each story of exile is unique. One of the aims of this film is to show that each exile carries a singular past, a specific baggage of trauma, of uprooting, of things and people left behind. Likewise, I tried to show how these exiles each have their own way of approaching life in their new country.
Can you tell us a little about the casting process and how your lead actors sought to convey this baggage of exile?
At first I thought I would cast Syrian actors, but it is very difficult for Syrians to star in a film about torture in their home country. Many were concerned about the safety of relatives back home or their own prospects of one day heading back.
It’s very difficult to play this type of character, because you have to express the opposite of what you’re thinking while also giving viewers an idea of what's actually churning beneath the surface. Adam (Bessa) spent several nights listening to witness accounts of the torture inflicted on prisoners in order to get a sense of the horror and find ways to convey it. We worked a lot on his gestures, how to convey the unconscious legacy of prison, and of course on acquiring a Syrian accent too.
Tawfeek (Barhom) on the other hand, had to learn French and make it credible enough to give the idea of a man who has severed ties with his home country and wants to assimilate in French society. And he pulled it off admirably.
