Bartas's most recent film begins with a stunning scene in which a group sets out to sea in a small boat. After being fired on by a customs launch, two men and a woman drift ashore on a North African coastal desert without food or other supplies. Increasingly despondent, they move together and apart, moments of tenderness eclipsed by an overwhelming sense of isolation. Largely silent, each speaks a different language. As in his previous films, Bartas purposefully suppresses further narrative detail, concerned instead with the moments between actions or when action is futile. Freedom explores the troubled territory of a modern condition-displacement and its resulting suffering. The landscape of sand and sea is breathtaking, and eternal, in contrast to the refugees whose survival is unlikely. For the Village Voice's Michael Atkinson, that may be Bartas's essential idea: “The waiting is the hardest part.”