Redemption

Three young American deserters who have fled to Canada question the motives and the finality of their joining the army, the reasons and consequences of their desertion, the brain-washing effect of military training and the propagandist lies… Redemption belongs to the same lineage of films as John Huston’s Let There Be Light (1946) and Michael Grigsby’s I Was a Soldier (1970), and challenges this “breaking point” that “any man has inside him”. Almost 40 year separate I Was a Soldier from Redemption, but this distance only serves to heighten the formal closeness of the two films. The same landscapes, the same sense of confinement, the same refusal to use archival footage, as if the only way of approaching the truth of human nature, of pinpointing the evil, was to first create a void and clear away the flood of media. (Yann Lardeau)