01/04/2022 - Mathieu Gérault’s debut work is a film noir flirting with social drama which reminds us of the incurable wounds inflicted by war

Exploring the legend of the return of a hero and the difficulties that come with returning to the civilian world, discovering that your idea of what life would be rarely corresponds with reality, Mathieu Gérault’s South Sentinel [+see also:
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Viewers shouldn’t expect any war scenes, however, because the film explores what happens after, shot between Lione and La Rochelle. Specifically, it’s a reconstruction of what really happened during a secret operation which ended in an ambush, wiping out the entire Carmin unit led by an ambiguous yet charismatic commander known as the Father (Denis Lavant, who’ll go down in history as Leos Carax’s actor of choice). On the commemorative plaque for soldiers who have lost their lives, we see a date, 18 August 2008, which refers to the Taliban ambush on the outskirts of Kabul which killed ten French soldiers. In the film (but definitely not in real life), this massacre (also of Afghan children) has its roots in an opium trafficking operation in which the film’s protagonists and a family of gypsies are also involved in back in France.

Canada’s Niels Schneider – revealed to the world at twenty years of age in I Killed My Mother and later in Heartbeats by Xavier Dolan, and recently seen alongside Charlotte Gainsbourg in Benoît Jacquot’s Suzanna Andler [+see also:
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South Sentinel was produced by Agat Films in co-production with Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Cinéma and with the CNC’s support. International sales are entrusted to Be for Films. The film is released in French cinemas on 27 April by way of UFO Distribution.

(Translated from Italian)