Melville has said of his rarely-screened (long unavailable in the U.S.) Resistance drama, “For the first time in this film I show things I have known and experienced. Nevertheless my truth... is subjective and has nothing to do with actual truth.... The book written by Kessel in the heat of the moment in 1943 is necessarily very different from the film shot cold by me in 1969.... Out of a sublime documentary about the Resistance, I have created a retrospective reverie; a nostalgic pilgrimage back to a period which profoundly marked my generation.” (Rui Nogueira, “Melville”)