When his daughter goes missing from their prairie town east of France, Alain and his young son, Kid, embark on a 16-year odyssey to track down the girl, who has run away and converted to Islam.
While the film's allusive structure demands a viewer's concentration, it rewards the effort with a timely message about overcoming the fear of the other and a quietly moving conclusion.
Bidegain and cinematographer Arnaud Potier speak multitudes with wide-angle, slow-panning shots that immerse us in a post-9/11 quagmire that's never less than utterly personal.
It succeeds in humanizing the world's biggest political football without taking sides. No easy task, but the impartiality robs the story of any emotional or rooting interest.
A drama where the echoes of western are clear and puts on the table, once again, the futility of the system in a kidnapping case. [Full review in Spanish]
It takes a lot of confidence for a director to pay homage to John Ford's "The Searchers" (1956), and in the case of Thomas Bidegain's "Les Cowboys" it is not altogether unwarranted.
