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Arts Cinema StageWeekend

We saw “The White Knights”

WhiteknightsFilm@(B2) The film 'The White Knights' by Joachim Lafosse retraces a story known to readers of our blog, that of Zoé's Ark.

However, it illustrates only one period and part of this 'tragic epic', the arrival in Chad of the NGO team until its arrest by the Chadian forces, with an essentially psychological plot: the rifts within the team, part of which gradually discover the full extent of the project (*). Extremely well-acted characters, who each time swing between white and black and largely retrace reality.

Observers relatively connoisseurs of the field will quickly have noticed some incongruities. It is a little warmer in the depths of Chad in Abéché. The airport runway is a bit super modern compared to what it actually is... And, apart from a sequence at the start, the French military presence remains quite limited. On the other hand, we see the arrival of European forces of EUFOR who stop the 'zozos' for a moment in the middle of prospecting in the villages. The EUFOR officer is very well placed in the skin of a Briton. This is for the novel. Because we all know that the nationals of Gracious Majesty were rather limited in number in the operation (2... if I remember correctly and more in the staff than in the field), unlike the Irish or Poles. For the image, certainly, it was better a Briton...

(NGV)

Read also the testimony that we had collected at the time: Testimony of the Belgian pilot of Operation Arche de Zoé / Children Rescue in Chad

 

Nicolas Gros Verheyde

Chief editor of the B2 site. Graduated in European law from the University of Paris I Pantheon Sorbonne and listener to the 65th session of the IHEDN (Institut des Hautes Etudes de la Défense Nationale. Journalist since 1989, founded B2 - Bruxelles2 in 2008. EU/NATO correspondent in Brussels for Sud-Ouest (previously West-France and France-Soir).

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