Country: France, Italy, Belgium, Poland
Language: French, Russian, Polish, Igbo, Nigerian English

About the film:

Winner of the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution at the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival.

Aleksei is a young Belarusian on the run from a past he must bury. In a form of Faustian pact, he becomes a member of the French Foreign Legion in exchange for the promise of French citizenship. Far away, in the Niger Delta, Jomo is a revolutionary activist, engaged in armed struggle to defend his community. Aleksei is a soldier, Jomo a guerrilla fighter. Because of one more senseless war, their destinies will intertwine.

“a visually thrilling, ambitious and distinctly freaky adventure into the heart of imperial darkness… This is bold film-making: a movie that wants to dazzle you with its standalone set pieces, but also to carry you along with its storytelling.”

– Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

Images courtesy of Big World Pictures

About the filmmaker:

Giacomo Abbruzzese was born in 1983 in Taranto, southern Italy, and lives and works between Paris and Madrid. A graduate of France’s Le Fresnoy, his short films have been selected and awarded in many international festivals including Oberhausen, Palm Springs, Clermont-Ferrand, Viennale, Mar del Plata, Tampere, Indielisboa, Nouveau Cinéma Montreal, Winterthur, Angers, Torino, and Leeds. They have been broadcast on such TV channels as Canal+, Arte, France3, France2, Sky Art, and SVT. Giacomo was an Artist-in-Residence at the Cannes Film Festival Cinéfondation, the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and at the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival. In 2022, he was nominated for a César Award for his documentary America (2020) and completed his first feature film, Disco Boy(2024), a France-Italy-Belgium-Poland coproduction, starring Franz Rogowski.

MAJOR SUPPORT
Ohio Arts Council
Greater Columbus Arts Council
The Columbus Foundation
Campus Partners
National Endowment for the Arts

WITH HELP FROM
G&J Pepsi
WOSU Public Media