Loin des barbares

Loin des Barbares is carried by Dominique Blanc’s wonderful female leading role. Her poignant performance can also be admired in Faut-il aimer Mathilde?, also showing at the festival. She plays Zana, a young woman who has lived almost all her life in Paris but is originally from Albania.As a baby she fled with her Uncle Selman Peza from Albania. Her parents are assumed to have succumbed to state terror. One day she gets a strange phone call. An Albanian refugee being held at the airport alleges he has information about her father. Might he still be alive?With the refugee, who manages to escape from the airport, she undertakes a search through the refugee hostels in and around Paris, which is accompanied by the necessary bureaucracy. In her surroundings she finds little help. Her French husband is not very sympathetic – the couple was about to leave for New York – but also friends of her uncle in the Albanian community in exile react negatively. Few people have an interest in digging up their past in Albania; not every political refugee turns out to have been on the ‘right’ side of the prison bars.Loin des Barbares was shot in a fast and sober realistic style; the maker’s documentary background is apparent in the crowd scenes with refugees, cleverly woven into the fiction.