Laurent Bécue-Renard (E91): Shooting War

Sarajevo, Iraq, Afghanistan… For 25 years now, the filmmaker Laurent Bécue-Renard (E91) has been filming the men and women confronted with the modern battlefield, trying with them to answer a universally human question: how to survive?

“I always detach myself from the order of events in my films, so it’s hard for me to give you a clear timeline of my own career.” But here, Laurent Bécue-Renard is willing to give it a try. He says that his career as a filmmaker began the moment he left the corporate world. “I was developing partnerships for the World Media Network, an international group home to more than 30 major newspapers, including Libération, who work together to publish special editions with contributions from the very best authors.” He was offered the post of vice-president when he was just 27 years old. “Instead of being over the moon, I felt the danger of being stuck in a ‘career’. I resigned two days later, without stopping to weigh the pros and cons and without even any plan – I just followed my intuition.”  

Looking for Something

He spent some time doing his research. Quite literally: he began a PhD at Columbia (NY, USA). “I wanted to study how we see the world based on where we come from, already questioning the relationship we each have with what’s actually real... But I hadn’t found the right subject, nor the right medium.”   

It would take another turning point before he found the right path. The year was 1995, and war was raging in Bosnia-Herzegovina. “My old boss suggested I start a pop-up online magazine in Sarajevo. The concept was to pierce a symbolic breach through the siege of the city, and to let people from all over the world ask the people in Sarajevo direct questions.” Remember that back then, there were only 30,000 internet connections on the planet, so offering such a platform for dialogue was a minor revolution. “The experiment was supposed to run for two weeks, made possible by a ceasefire. But combat restarted and I found myself stuck. I ended up staying there until the war was over.”   

The people he met during that time inspired him to write short stories, which he posted on the website alongside first-hand accounts and news articles. “It was fiction based on documentary observation. And it was a revelation. I’d always wanted to tell a story. And those years spent exploring and trying things out had, in fact, been useful in accumulating material, content.”  

The Story Finds a Way

After the conflict, Laurent Bécue-Renard met a Bosnian counsellor who was helping war-widows rebuild their lives. “These young women had lost their partners, their fathers, brothers, uncles, and cousins. Every man in the family, massacred.” In these tragedies, he saw a fractal of the human condition. “The only way to face up to them was to tell themselves stories. To ‘invent’ a story that gave meaning to their experience”.  And therapy is where these stories were born. “I wanted to show the people within this space of reconstruction, or creation.”   

He was able to film support groups for Bosnian women. “I abandoned text in favour of images because so many things are said in ways that don’t involve words: body language, silence, how a scene is laid out… Cinema, basically.” He adopted an approach that couldn’t be further from documentary in style. “My camera plays a role in creating the story and the meaning that forms on-screen while the therapy is in session. It’s a highly subjective view, but one that serves the psychological truth of the protagonists.”   

It was a strategy that demanded plenty of care. “I was constantly analysing what I was doing. Asking myself questions about the person we were filming: will she be at peace with our depiction of her? About myself: why did I choose this particular person? Why use this or that part of her answer? About the meaning of what we were showing: what does it express that’s universal, that applies to humanity as a whole, that transcends the individual and the event and will touch every man and woman who sees it? The filtering that takes place in answering these questions, over the course of the filming and editing, is itself an almost analytical process.”   

From Introspection to Projection

The film, entitled Living Afterwards: Words of Women, was released seven years later and won the Peace Film Prize at the Berlin Film Festival, going on to be screened at festivals all over the world. “I must have been invited to take part in more than 300 debates in total. Viewers felt affected, touched. Perhaps because we all belong to families broken by the wars of the 20th century. From this point of view, as descendants of survivors, we are all survivors ourselves.”   

The public success encouraged him to dig deeper in his subject. He began working on his second film, which would consolidate his method. The same system: a camera filming a therapy session, but this time for young American soldiers who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan. The same time-frame: years of filming and editing – 550 hours of rushes, some 6 months of viewing... and the same fundamental question: how can we go on? The film encountered the same success: Of Men and War was shown in the official selection at the Cannes Film Festival. “These awards are important, of course, because they encourage you to persevere. But they aren’t an end in and of themselves. The purpose is the personal journey.”   

A journey that would ultimately produce a trilogy, A Genealogy of Wrath, the final instalment of which is now in production: Childhood at War. “After women and men, we are now seeing war through the eyes of a child who has experienced it. What language do they use to describe the unspeakable?” The trilogy will be followed by an epilogue, a more personal and intimate reflection on the reasons that drove him to spend what would become 30 years working on this venture. 

Screen Sharing

Amongst his motivations, you can glimpse a desire to share his knowledge. “A few years ago, I joined a mentoring programme, which takes up an increasing amount of my time. I share my experience with young filmmakers all over the world. It’s a two-way exchange: I advise them on their work, and they feed my own artistic reflection. It’s especially touching to see that, no matter their background or home country, they all ask the same questions. You realise then that all of our stories are part of a single, gargantuan narrative that is constantly being renewed, that of humanity in search of meaning.”