The Officers' Ward

The film speaks less of War itself than of its consequences: the difficulty of surviving while disfigured. "Outside the ward men are fighting and destroying each other. Deep down within oneself the same conflict is going on, in different forms. Adrien has lost his face, he will never find it again. But he will find peace and an inner strength which leaves no room for conflict" (François Dupeyron). The difficulty for Dupeyron and his director of photography, Tetsuo Nagata, was being able to show wounds without crossing into horror. "Tetsuo has a very particular sense of shadow and light. Leaving a wound in the semi-darkness has a much greater impact on our senses than does exposing it in full light. A good part of our work consisted in deciding on what we would show and what we would hide" (François Dupeyron).