PÖFF 2016: Stopover

Arriving at an army psychological decompression camp in a fancy Cyprus resort, the platoon of French soldiers coming from a mission from the Middle East, they ara forced the face the fresh memories and traumas caused by combat. Adding to the emotional distress, the lead characters – strong roles by Ariane Labed ("Lobster") and actor-singer Soko ("Augustine", "Her") - have another dimension of pressure to endure, being the only female soldiers in the platoon, fighting off the endemic mysogynism still present in some forms in the the once-male-only profession.

As their witty debut "17 Girls" (which was also screened in the programme of PÖFF’s subfestival Just Film) already expressed, the directing-scriptwriting sister duo Muriel and Delphine Coulin have an ability to offer a fresh perspective on the topics they have decided to tackle, offering it all with cinematographically outstanding style. The steady, slow-burning and gradually rising pressure that is building up towards the inevitable boiling point and the smart method of contrasting the soldiers in distress with their surrounding environment and the vacating European bourgeois becomes an almost anthropolgical study of cultural contrasts. The film received a well-deserved award for best screenplay at the Cannes’ Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard programme.

Hannes Aava