There’s an all-too-resonant scene in Joachim Lafosse’s bitter drama in which children have their age verified by their teeth – though the drama focuses on westerners who actually want to welcome refugees. A bit too much, in fact: in a story based on the real-life 2007 Zoe’s Ark controversy, Vincent Lindon leads an NGO in Chad that masquerades as an orphanage but plans to abscond with the kids back to adoptive families in France. The organisation lets neither the fractious Saharan security situation, or the local chiefs’ pragmatic propensity for fibbing about the ages and parentage of kids they wish to offload, get in the way of its unwavering and mostly selfish idealism.
It’s a diagnosis of geopolitical power relations nearly as effective as the 2012 Somali pirate thriller A Hijacking. Lafosse damns his do-gooders in a disciplined set of medium-shot dustscapes and murky Conradian interiors, rarely allowing anyone – even the pugnacious, impatient Lindon – to plead their case in closeup. A slanted but shrewd look at another side of today’s refugee crisis.
