About Ghost Trail

Hamid, a member of a secret organisation who hunts down war criminals, roams through France and Germany on his own, looking for his persecutor. With Adam Bess’s intense, spectral interpretation, Ghost Trail is an intimate, gripping, sensoric spy film whose potency is reminiscent of classic American conspiracy films of the 70s. 

Jonathan Millet’s interview

Ghost Trail is the continuation of my work on migration through narrative film and documentary. I have kept my bearing; I seek to capture singular individual destinies to explore exile through the perspective of human beings.

My own life story can be read between the lines of this intimate script. I lived a little over a year in Aleppo, Syria. I was 20 and the war hadn’t started yet. A few years later war broke out and my friends in Aleppo would send me the footage they had shot the previous week. I experienced war and the destruction of our neighborhood through these videos. They fled to Istanbul, where I visited them several times, in the heart of the Syrian community in Turkey, and later to Germany.   

I wanted to make my characters into movie heroes to pay tribute to these stories of exile that I had heard about, and which would make any adventure film screenwriter blanch. What first struck me in these exiles' quest is how urgent and how modern it is. 

My way into this is to look for what cannot be seen, through the means cinema offers: secret cells, the human and geopolitical stakes of exiles. I want to tell the stories of those who are left in the shadows by thoroughly investigating the stakes overlooked by the media. 

I like talking about spy films. Spying is observing others and the lies we tell about ourselves. I wanted to tackle this genre and its universal stakes, rather than a more predictable, ultra-realistic, representation of what could be just another human interest story. I believe in the intensity and breadth it brings to the story and the characters, who then become tragic heroes, just like the great film noir figures that shaped my love for cinema. 

Work on the senses permeates throughout Ghost Trail: listening, touching, smelling. The mise-en-scène delves us deep into Hamid’s inner life, to the very core of his doubts. The film is propelled by his senses, brushing against his skin, his face, his body, and his emotions.