A Violent Life

Paris, 2001: student Stéphane (Jean Michelangeli) receives a phone call from back home in Corsica telling him that his childhood friend Christophe (Henri-Noël Tabary) has been murdered by a criminal gang. As Stéphane makes plans to return to Corsica, memories come flooding back of his youth on the island, and how he abandoned his comfortable middle-class life to join an armed insurgency for whom criminal enterprise was but a means to wage war against the French occupiers. Loosely based on real-life events, Corsican-born filmmaker Thierry de Peretti (APACHES) delivers a meditative rumination on the place where complicated national histories, identity politics and organized crime intersect.