Avoir vingt ans dans les Aurès

Spring 1961: A bunch of draftees from Brittany, rebellious pacifists, arrive at their station in the Aurès, where they find themselves under the command of a tough-assed Indochina veteran intent on making soldiers out of them. And they do indeed learn to kill, first for survival, then – well, because it’s the thing you do in war.
Avoir vingt ans dans les Aurès (1972) is, above all, an experiment in empathy. Can one feel the doubt, the spiritual collapse of an earlier generation, recreate their inner turmoil? To give his actors – quite a few of them amateurs from a background similar to that of their characters – something serious to work with on the search for an emotional truth, Vautier conducted several hundreds of interviews with veterans. If a certain number of them told the same story, pointing out the same details, it could become part of the film’s narrative.