About halfway into “The Green Eyes,” the inspiration for Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh’s second feature makes itself known as a news report plays about “resignation syndrome,” a mysterious malady that was reported to crop up in refugees as the stress of the uncertainty they face without a stable home could be literally paralyzing. The filmmakers know trauma can lead to a detachment from reality, having previously envisioned housing projects in their native France as if they existed on another planet in “Gagarine,” only within reach of civilization when marked for demolition that residents must fight to protect the lives they’ve built without any assistance, and the fusion of social consciousness and surrealism has distinguished them when the stories they tell on a baseline level are generally the kind that audiences go to the theater to get away from rather than seek out.
The duo’s ingenuity once again has a way of pulling you in for their second feature, which centers on the Abedelhossein family from Turkey that has made their home in the Landes region of France where it seems few actually live, though many come to surf on the coast. Though he found shelter not too far inland for for his young daughter Chaya (Douae Butarbuch Mzaouki) and her older brother Nour (Sayyid El Alami), Rafi (Omar Al Jbaai) can’t enjoy the beachside property when it appears their bid for asylum is about to end and has a month left to make some money to set them up for a new life elsewhere, and while it isn’t unreasonable for him to think that the kids will be able to fend for themselves, particularly when the family is surrounded by a kindly community from Chaya’s school teacher Mrs. Torres (“Happening” star Anamaria Vartolomei) to Ben (Arcadi Radeff), the local lighthouse keeper, he couldn’t predict that Nour’s despair would run so deep as to render him unconscious, leaving the prepubescent Chaya in charge for at least a few weeks with little way to get in touch with their dad.
Liatard and Trouilh’s fanciful approach may not be for everyone, but the filmmakers take an interest in the young born into a cruel world they had no hand in creating and have an appreciation for their perspective that is undeniably moving and can appeal to those of the same age as well as adults. When the responsibility falls on Chaya to hold the fort and by extension keep a connection alive between both her father and her brother after the family’s matriarch passed away during migration, the girl benefits from what she can’t know yet at her age, unable to draw the same conclusions that damn Nour into lethargy and believes that something can be done to change their fate. She confides in Ben after her brother goes to sleep, “He’s hiding in his dreams,” offering a diagnosis that is likely more accurate than the doctors can deduce and it’s indicative of an understanding of her specific circumstances that would be elusive to anyone not experiencing them firsthand, not content to idly standby as the professionals are at a loss for deciding on proper treatment and would like to put Chaya in foster care since it’s the traditional course of action.
If not for so vividly taking the view of its heroine, “The Green Eyes” might feel a bit traditional as well when boiled down to its bare essence, the tale of a scrappy, resourceful child trying to keep what little she has left has been around in one form or another since the silent era. But Liatard and Trouilh, once again working with an ethereal score from “The Little Sister” composer Amine Bouhafa and drawing on an evocative setting that really does seem to exist at a remove from the rest of the world, take audiences somewhere different, as much geographically as psychologically when it sees the world through the eyes of a child, accepting of an inevitable loss of innocence with a valiant attempt to hold onto imagination.
“Les Yeux Verts (The Green Eyes)” does not yet have U.S. distribution.