The face of a Syrian refugee is the enigmatic key to this slow-burning drama-thriller, the fiction feature debut of French film-maker Jonathan Millet; it is hard, blank, withdrawn, yet showing us an inexpressible agony, a suppressed, unprocessed trauma, complicated by what is evidently a new strategic wariness. The refugee is Hamid (played by Adam Bessa), a former literature professor from Aleppo who is now in Strasbourg in France in 2016,
Millet's new film, Ghost Trail, follows a Syrian refugee in Strasbourg as he attempts to locate the man who brutalised him in Sednaya prison, Damascus. Ghost Trail therefore joins the roll call of cerebral films that manufacture an uncanny power from what isn't depicted. But here, it's not achieved in exactly the same fashion as ones where the consequential action is cropped out of view.
Lawmakers from Chancellor Friedrich Merz's Conservative Democrats are calling for more to be done to make returning home a more attractive prospect for Syrians who have sought refuge in Germany.
Hardly a day goes by without a new insult being hurled in the faces of asylum seekers and refugees. We're scroungers, rapists, fighting-age men who shouldn't have left our home countries. Sometimes we're simply illegals, the most dehumanising term of all. When did it become a crime to run for your life? The people levelling these accusations are superb at making themselves heard. Mud sticks and most of us