4th INTERFILM Award for Promoting Interreligious Dialogue, Venice, 2014
With the film Loin des hommes (2014), based on an Albert Camus story, director David Oelhoffen tells a parable of human relationship overcoming hostility. Two men share a common faith in mutual dignity even though coming from different religious and cultural background and a unique friendship develops across cultural barriers. The director has managed to accomplish a film of clarity and ethical accuracy set in a striking Algerian landscape. The film displays the existential choice in every time to question corrupted cultural norms, prejudices and hatred. David Oelhoffens story provides a call to approve equality and life, acknowledging the other as your neighbour.
“Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself”. (Albert Camus in his Nobel Prize Speech, Stockholm 1957).
