Film Screening — Ghost Trail

Ghost Trail [Les Fantômes]

(Jonathan Millet, 2024, 106 min, France / Belgium / Germany, French, Arabic, Turkish, and English with English subtitles, DCP)

-- Introduced by Emerita Professor miriam cooke (AMES); Q&A to follow

Two years after being released from Syrian jail, Hamid (Adam Bessa) is making ends meet as a construction worker in the French city of Strasbourg, where, haunted by the memory of his imprisonment, the young man searches tirelessly for the man who tortured him, determined to get his revenge—but what’s the real price of vengeance for the person seeking it? Inspired by true events, Jonathan Millet’s deeply researched thriller excavates the too-little-examined moral dilemmas and political negligence that traumatized migrants must confront amid the struggle to rebuild their lives and take control of their destinies at the margins of contemporary French society, inviting audiences to better empathize with France’s newest residents, and to better understand their place in the world—and our own.

“The quest for justice fuels a tense manhunt in the first fiction feature from writer/director Jonathan Millet, which balances cloak and dagger intrigue with an acute psychological exploration of grief, loss and exile.” – Screen International