2026 • 85 min
The Green Eyes
Les Yeux Verts
This movie was screened on
Synopsis
Chaya is eleven years old, the daughter of refugees, and lives in south-western France with her father Rafi and her brother Nour. When deportation looms over the family, Nour shuts down. Not metaphorically: he falls into that condition of radical withdrawal from the world known as resignation syndrome. Chaya, on the other hand, reacts. If her brother can no longer return to the real world, she will look for him in the only place where it still seems possible to reach him: the realm of dreams.
Review
6 min read
Reviewed by Beatrice
· 17. September 2026
We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
— Joan Didion
— Joan Didion
Resignation Syndrome is a dramatic condition, observed primarily in children belonging to asylum-seeking families, in whom the impossibility of imagining a future can turn into a progressive withdrawal from the world, eventually leading to a kind of prolonged, profound sleep. It is a phenomenon as real as it is little known, and precisely for this reason cinema has good reason to return to it.
Dea Gjinovci did so with Wake Up on Mars, a documentary capable of approaching the phenomenon without pretending to solve its mystery. And Alexandros Avranas did so with Quiet Life, bringing the same subject into fiction and tightening the drama until it became a political, familial and existential question. In both cases, cinema managed to do something rather difficult: to tell horror without feeling compelled to constantly explain that it was an incomprehensible system.
The opening film of both the Locarno Film Festival and the Villa Medici Film Festival, The Green Eyes, directed by Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh, returns to the same territory but chooses a different path: that of the fairy tale and the fantastic.
The idea itself has potential. A body withdrawing from reality because reality has become unbearable; a little girl attempting to retrieve it through imagination; the political border becoming a psychic border; sleep as the ultimate form of exile. There is virtually everything needed to construct a parable about the relationship between trauma, memory, the body and the possibility of a future. Perhaps even too much.
Because The Green Eyes has a curious problem: it does not trust the spectator enough.
It tells the trauma, shows it, repeats it, underlines it. It tells the escape, tells the journey, tells the crossing by boat, tells the death of the mother. And when it seems that the trauma has finally found its place, it comes back to tell us about it through the fantastic, through dreams, through symbols. It is as though the film were afraid that we might not have understood.
The result is a form of didacticism that weakens precisely what it wants to make more intense. The trauma is not left to settle: it is constantly reactivated through the narrative, as though the spectator needed to be provided with a certificate authenticating the pain.
And here the film stumbles upon an interesting contradiction. It tells the story of a boy who can no longer speak, react or move, while the film itself seems unable to avoid rhetoric.
The fantastic device suffers from the same excess. The dreams return, the black liquid returns, the images are reiterated until they lose the disturbing ambiguity that might have made them genuinely unsettling. A symbol, repeated for long enough, risks turning into a piece of exposition with aesthetic ambitions. The problem is not the fantastic. It is the way it is used.
And some passages of the screenplay also prove unconvincing. Not because the reality from which the film takes its cue is implausible: on the contrary, it is precisely the reality of resignation syndrome that is so disturbing. But because the dramatic construction does not always succeed in transforming that reality into a cinematic necessity. Some elements seem to have been inserted to guarantee the story yet another layer of trauma, when the initial trauma would already have been enough.
The family's story is exemplary in this respect. The crossing, the loss of the mother, exile, the threat of deportation, Nour's collapse: every element is dramatically powerful. But accumulating traumas does not necessarily produce greater depth. Sometimes it simply prevents trauma from breathing.
And this is a shame, because the film possesses two presences capable of doing exactly what the screenplay does not always manage to do: Douae Butarbuch Mzaouki and Sayyid El Alami, in the roles of Chaya and Nour.
They are the ones, above all, who restore a concrete dimension to the film. The face, the body, the silence, the relationship between brother and sister are far more eloquent than many of the symbols constructed around them. Their performances are effective precisely because they do not need to add too much: they simply need to be there.
And perhaps this is the lesson The Green Eyes could have learned from the two films with which it inevitably enters into dialogue.
In Wake Up on Mars, the mystery remains open. The documentary does not pretend to turn the phenomenon into a definitive explanation: it observes, listens, allows the girls' sleep to produce a question larger than the answer. In Quiet Life, by contrast, fiction compresses the drama and turns it into a narrative machine of almost claustrophobic precision. The pain is not multiplied: it is concentrated.
The Green Eyes, instead, chooses proliferation: trauma, deportation, journey, death, dream, black liquid, memory, the fantastic. And in the end the film risks doing what works too conscious of their own importance often do: explaining their own depth instead of producing it.
The subject remains necessary. And precisely because it is, it deserves a form capable of resisting the temptation to become pedagogical. Resignation syndrome does not need to be transformed into a moral fairy tale in order to be terrible. It is already terrible in its naked reality: a child who, faced with the impossibility of imagining a future, stops inhabiting the present.
There is something profoundly existential in this short circuit. Human beings do not live only in the present: they live through their capacity to anticipate what does not yet exist. When the future is erased, the present itself can become uninhabitable. Nour is not simply fleeing from reality; he is fleeing from a reality that no longer offers him any place in which to exist.
But cinema does not become deeper by insisting on the depth of its subject.
The film needed to subtract, not add. To trust more fully in Nour's silence, in Chaya's gaze, in the very absurdity of a child's body shutting down in the face of an administrative decree. Where reality is already monstrous enough, the fantastic does not necessarily need to invent other monsters.
The Green Eyes therefore remains a film driven by an authentic urgency and by a rare, necessary and little-known subject, but its mise-en-scène ultimately proves more elementary and repetitive than the material demands. A film that possesses a strong idea — childhood imagination as the last territory of resistance when reality has erased every possibility of a future — but that does not always succeed in transforming it into an equally strong form.
The paradox is almost cruel: in telling of an existence withdrawing from a world that has become unbearable, the film should have left the spectator with a greater space in which to lose themselves. Instead, too often, it shows them the way.
The sleep of reason produces monsters.
Walter Benjamin
