Part of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s mission is to foster greater understanding through world cinema. This year 72 Foreign Language films were submitted for Golden Globes consideration. Here is an overview of one of them.

Algeria1954. The war for independence is just starting in the country, still a French colony. Daru, a schoolteacher in a remote mountain village reluctantly agrees to escort Mohamed to a town far away to face trial for murder. On the surface, these two men couldn’t be more different in background, culture and upbringing. Daru is an ex-French army soldier born here from Spanish lineage and seen as a foreigner, considered an Arab by the French and a Frenchman by the locals. He refuses to pick a side in the developing conflict, wanting instead to stay neutral in the fight opposing the French colonizers who consider the country theirs and the insurrectionist rebels who think the same. As their long and slow trek progresses through the Atlas Mountains, the two men will begin to understand each other and develop an unlikely bond. The weary, quiet veteran who has shielded himself from his fellow men, and the young man who knows little of the world but is prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice; both reluctant rebels finding themselves fighting for a new kind of freedom.

As Daru, Viggo Mortensen, who also co-produced French director David Oelhoffen’s sophomore film, projects the quiet strength and intensity of a man of few words (in French no less, with a sprinkle of Arabic as well) suddenly faced with a dilemma which challenges his apolitical convictions. As Mohamed, Reda Kateb (seen in A Prophet and Zero Dark Thirty as well as Ryan Gosling’s Lost River) is equally impressive.

Adapted from The Host, a short story by Albert Camus, albeit with a different ending, Far From Men often evokes in tone and scope some of the great Westerns by John Ford and Delmer Daves or John Huston’s The Unforgiven. Majestic scenery and score from Nick Cave and Warren Ellis contribute to that feeling.

It also undeniably has contemporary resonance, as though written before Algeria won its independence in 1962, Camus’ work was a despairing meditation on the monstrous impossibility of choice. The Algerian war is still politically sensitive for the French and only a few films have really dealt with the subject matter. As Viggo Mortensen remarks, “this is an important story about dialogue, friendship and tolerance between two Algerians, a Muslim and a Christian. Albert Camus was, after all, concerned with communication among and about all peoples, about seeing beyond the physical and psychological boundaries that separate them. What happens in the film could make you think about Palestine, about the Middle East now: people who don’t want to take part in politics or violence but find themselves in the middle of it.” That is what makes Far From Men even more relevant as a human story beyond the existential questions of allegiance and loyalty.

Jean Paul Chaillet