In military terminology, inner lines are escape routes which are located near opposing lines. They provide a way of passing undetected and fleeing. Around Mount Ararat, in Turkey and Armenia, messengers and their carrier pigeons travel along these parallel paths to meet up with communities in the grip of war. During their wanderings, they encounter Yezidis who have fled from the atrocities committed by Daesh and found refuge in transit camps in Turkey. They stand beside the last living survivors of the Armenian genocide. They travel around war-torn Nagorno-Karabakh, to accompany and support the bereaved families there. Throughout the story, men and women bear witness to what they have endured, to their shattered lives, to life, fighting off death. Above all, their words tell a tale of violence inflicted by men on other men, a violence that seems everlasting and obstinate.

Those who suffer from the melancholy of eternity are called eternals. Convinced that death cannot take their lives, they believe they are condemned to wander around waiting for the day when they will be released from their existence. This film is a tale of wanderings and escapes, on the borders of Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan. Inhabited by the ghosts of the genocide and by the war that has been raging there for more than twenty years, the characters who traverse this film carry within them the melancholy of the eternal.

Une Jeunesse Allemande tells the history of the Rote Armee Fraktion (or Red Army Faction, a German revolutionary terrorist group from the 1970s founded notably by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof) as well as the images generated by this story. The film is entirely produced by editing preexisting visual and sound archives and aims to question viewers on the significance of this revolutionary movement during its time, as well as its resonance for today’s society. In the 1960s, the young democracy of West Germany was embarrassed by its Nazi past, and ingrown in its role as imperialist and capitalist outpost faced by its communist double. The postwar generation, in direct conflict with their fathers, was trying to find its place. The student movement exploded in 1966. The pas de deux between students and the government deteriorated, and radicalized those involved in a gradual escalation of violence and reprisals. From this seething youth emerged the journalist Ulrike Meinhof, filmmaker Holger Meins, students Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, as well as the lawyer Horst Mahler. When the student movement collapsed at the end of ’68, they remained isolated in their radicalism, and desperately sought ways to continue the revolutionary struggle. The RAF (Red Army Faction) was founded in 1970, its militants disappearing into hiding. Both the government and sympathizers appeared cautious. Initial RAF acts, along with police responses, involved a certain amount of improvisation. Then came 1972, and the irreparable break: in less than a week, the RAF committed five major attacks, resulting in many victims. The government reacted by taking a hardline stance in its conflict with the terrorist movement. Casualties grew on all sides, including the RAF (both outside and in prison), government (police officers but also politicians and officials), and especially anonymous civilians. Voices questioning both the political and moral implications of the RAF’s combat, as well as the federal government’s choice for total repression, were progressively drowned out. The autumn of ’77 marked the bloody finale to this story, which was also a war of images. The government refused to capitulate to the demands of both the RAF— which sought the release of its imprisoned members in exchange for Schleyer, the kidnapped president of the Employer Union—as well as the Palestinian commandos who, won over to the RAF cause, had hijacked a plane of German tourists. That same night, the plane was taken by storm at the Mogadishu airport, and the hostages were freed, while in Germany the final founding members of the RAF who were still alive “committed suicide” in prison, and Schleyer was killed by his abductors.