Lignes de front (2010)
Directed by Jean-Christophe Klotz

Film Review

1994 was the year in which the indifference of the West to the problems of Africa was brought into sharp relief, thanks to a handful of journalists who decided that a small matter of genocide was something the world should know about.  The massacre of around a million Tutsis by extreme militant Hutus in Rwanda took place over a three month period and represented a failure not only of the United Nations, which was unwilling to send more than a token peacekeeping force to the country (too small to achieve anything useful), but also of the world community to put pressure on their governments to intervene and arrest the carnage.  The Dark Continent might as well be re-christened the Invisible Continent.

One of the first journalists to sound the alarm that awoke the rest of the world to the crisis in Rwanda was a 32-year-old French news reporter Jean-Christophe Klotz, who was sent to the country in April 1994 to compile a report for French television on the evacuation of French nationals after the assassination of President Juvénal Habyarimana.  Klotz subsequently made an award-winning documentary, Kigali, des images contre un massacre (2006), which offered a sobering reflection on the politics of the Rwanda genocide, and also the role of the media in reporting it.  Four years on, Klotz relates his own experiences in Lignes de front, his first dramatic feature.

In contrast to Klotz's earlier documentary, Lignes de front concerns itself not with the objective reality of genocide but with the subjective experience of someone who is brought face-to-face with it.  There is a striking similarity with Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), in that, confronted with an atrocity of soul-shattering proportions, the central character is impelled to undertake a dark personal journey in an attempt to make sense of the madness he has observed.  As with Klotz's earlier documentary, the film condemns the West's indifference to the Rwanda mass killings and it raises some important questions over the role that journalists have to play in influencing public opinion. However, these are tangential to the film's real purpose, which is to invite reflection on whether an individual acting on his own initiative can ever change things for the better.

It is more than fifteen years since the genocide in Rwanda finally made it onto our television screens (too late to make much of a difference), but judging by the spate of films that have been made since the massacre (for example, Terry George's Hotel Rwanda and Michael Caton-Jones' Shooting Dogs) it remains very much in the public consciousness.  What distinguishes Jean-Christophe Klotz's film is its focus on the individual.  It is not concerned with generalities, it doesn't set out to make a great political point or to lecture us on man's inhumanity to man.  Rather, it is a low-key film that is simply about one man who wants to change the world for the better but finds he cannot. The question that Klotz poses in his intense and conscience-stirring film is: what would you do in his situation - step in and risk your own neck, or simply roll over and go back to sleep?

Jean-Christophe Klotz could have legitimately played the main character in the film (the journalist Antoine) but wisely he instead cast Jalil Lespert in his place.  It is an admirable choice as Lespert has an excellent track record when it comes to playing characters who are outwardly tough and resilient, but inwardly sensitive and surprisingly fragile.  Antoine's gradual transformation, from someone who merely observes, to someone who is impelled to get involved, is portrayed by Lespert with a harrowing sense of reality, and it is hard not to identify with his character as he becomes increasily caught up in his own private battle against the indifference of others.  The film's sober ending may at first appear pessimistic but it offers the tiniest sliver of hope.  Even if one man cannot change the world by himself, it may just be possible for him to influence a dozen others who might begin to make a difference, whilst the rest of the world sleeps on in blissful ignorance.

Film Synopsis

Antoine Rives is a freelance journalist who is preparing a report on repatriated Rwandans.  In the course of his work, he gets to know Clément, a Rwandan student of Hutu origin who is married to a Tutsi woman named Alice.  The latter has gone missing, so Antoine persuades Clément to accompany him to Rwanda so that they can look for her.  What Antoine witnesses in this troubled African country surpasses his worst expectations and he wonders to what extent he should expose this human tragedy to the rest of the world.