Les Chevaliers Blancs

Joachim Lafosse, the Belgian maestro of mixed feelings, collected a French all-star cast led by Vincent Lindon for his most ambitious film so far. A team of NGO workers arrives in restless Chad, where they claim to offer local children shelter and education in a secure compound.

Belgian filmmaker Lafosse has made a name for himself in recent years with impressive and intimate drama’s such as Private Property with Isabelle Huppert and Our Children with Emilie Dequenne. In The White Knights he finds himself in the area of world politics and current affairs, but then with the sharp and oppressive questions about uneasy reality so typical of Lafosse.

The film is based on the L’Arche de Zoé affair, in which a French humanitarian organization abused its status in 2007 to take children out of Chad for French adoptive parents. Vincent Lindon, France’s favourite actor right now, plays Jacques Arnault, head of the NGO Move for Kids who, with his team, tries to get three hundred orphaned children out of war-torn Chad. What can be wrong with that? Surely nothing. The members of the team – and the viewer – are soon confronted with a minefield of moral dilemmas.