Vies clandestines
Nos années afghanes
Christophe de Ponfilly
2001 - 90 min - Beta numérique - Couleur - France

The experiences of French men and women through the Afghan war, throughout the 1980s. After "Massoud l'Afghan" (1998), the director invites us again on a new journey towards these distant lands, ill-known and forgotten, but this time goes further by inviting us to reflect on French society faced with this type of dramatic and unfortunately universal event.
This documentary touches that which is most sensitive in our French society : its own conscience. We learn the reasons and motives that led over a thousand French individuals to get involved clandestinely, often putting their lives at risk, in a distant war that essentially was not theirs.
Like a rite of passage, in search of intensity and meaning, far from their everyday city lives, "Clandestines lives" appeals to the citizens that we are. Understanding a commitment, its strength and its consequences. Under the noses of the soviet army, then considered one of the most feared in the world, individuals become actors playing a full part in this conflict : journalists, spies or mercenaries on one hand, surgeons, aid workers, politicians... on the other.
As the stories are told, accompanied by a lot of archive footage, through the richness of the testimony, this film unveils strange accounts, sometimes funny, always intense. An open book of as many illustrations of adventures as each of us can experience in a lifetime, this documentary reveals a page of contemporary history, no doubt filmed too fast, on which nobody has yet focused.