The hunt for war criminals begins in The Ghosts (trailer)
Adam Bessa (Mosul) follows Tawfeek Barhom (The Cairo Conspiracy) in Jonathan Millet's first feature film, selected for Critics' Week 2024.
So far, Jonathan Millet had only made documentaries (Ceuta, sweet prison), or short films (And still we walk, selected for the 2019 César). With The ghosts, presented as the opening of the Critics' Week at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, he signs his first feature film… fiction. The story is that of Hamid (Adam Bessa), a young man surviving Syria's prisons, now a member of a secret organization tracking down Syrian war criminals hiding in Europe – the Yaqaza Cell. His target: his former executioner (played by Tawfeek Barhom) residing in Strasbourg. “It’s the devil himself.”
Inspired by real events, the documentary is ultimately never very far away. In the press kit, the director explains that he traveled a lot and stayed in Aleppo in Syria before the war. During these trips, he met exiles:
“I spent many weeks in a care center for victims of war and torture. I met a large number of Syrians whose stories I listened to, of war, of imprisonment, of torture.”
It is by listening to them and carrying out research that Jonathan Millet designs The ghosts, and this manhunt moving from Germany to France. The recently released trailer reveals a spy story mixed in a thriller with intense tension:
“I find through fiction, and the choice of genre, a way of telling the reality that has nourished me.”
The ghosts will be released in cinemas on July 3.
