Our Men

“I’m a filmmaker first and foremost. But it’s true that I have a special relationship with the military milieu.

At nineteen, when I wanted to travel to Brazil and was looking for a little job to pay the airfare, I came across a recruitment ad that offered initial training to become a reserve soldier. For two weeks, I discovered a world very different from my own. In the Foreign Legion, there are 152 nationalities: men from all over the world. Within a two-month period, they have to become a family.

They have no other homeland than the Legion, no other brothers than their brothers in arms, no other religion than the army. They are given four hundred words in French, rules, songs, and a shared language that will help them become brothers. For my film, this provided an extreme situation in terms of gender division, since there are no women legionaries. So it’s quite binary: on the one hand the legionaries and on the other their partners or wives. These women come from all over, from the ends of the earth. They have left everything to find themselves alone, uprooted, isolated, with absent husbands. It is possibly one of the worst possible configurations for a couple.”