Three men transport painting across wartorn 18th-century Europe

A debut fiction feature by Pauline Julier and Nicolas Chapoulier, *The Indies*, will premiere in Venice Days next month, following three men who carry a single painting across a Europe torn by war. The film lands at the Lido on 3 September, marking the first time Venice’s parallel strand has screened a debut feature from a French directing duo in over a decade.

Behind the journey is a historical conceit: the trio sets out in 1792, the year France declared war on Austria and Prussia, turning the continent into a battlefield that would not end until Napoleon’s defeat. The directors use that moment to ask how today’s conflicts recycle older patterns of violence and migration. Julier, who cut her teeth on documentaries about displaced people, and Chapoulier, known for hybrid essays blending archive and fiction, argue that the 18th-century road is the same path refugees still walk.

The 90-minute film was shot in 14 days last winter on locations that still bear the scars of twentieth-century wars—eastern France, the Low Countries, the Balkans. Lead actor Elias Lazaridis, a Greek stage actor making his screen debut, carries the canvas through snowdrifts and forest clearings while two companions—one a deserter, the other a painter—debate whether art can outlast the chaos. Rough cuts have impressed critics who caught sneak previews in Paris; Venice Days programmers called it “a pocket epic, intimate yet geopolitical.”

What matters now is whether the film will travel beyond festival circuits. The directors are in talks with a French distributor and plan a 2025 release timed to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the French Revolution. They hope the painting—its face scratched out at the start, slowly revealed by the journey—becomes a silent witness to the cyclical nature of war and the stubborn persistence of beauty.