-Date: 19 July-

Presented on the occasion of Heman Chong’s major survey exhibition at SAM, Heman Chong: This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness.

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Foreign Legion officer Galoup recalls his once glorious life, training troops in the Gulf of Djibouti. His existence there was happy, strict and regimented, until the arrival of a promising young recruit, Sentain, plants the seeds of jealousy in Galoup's mind.

Heman Chong's Notes on Beau Travail:

Back in 1999, I experienced 'Beau Travail' alone, and in the loneliness, I was drenched in the heat, sweat and lust found in the seminal film by Claire Denis. There are few films that refuse narrative resolution so exquisitely, so absolutely, that they become events rather than stories. This is one of those rare events. It is not a film you watch. It is a film you surrender to, in the same way you surrender to exhaustion, to heat, to a body you cannot possess. I think often about how we make art about structure, about systems, about politics, and forget that all of these things live inside the body.

'Beau Travail' remembers. It listens to bodies, especially male bodies, in all their rigidity and their tenderness. I often think about Beau Travail as a monument to silence, to solitude, to the unbearable beauty of things that never happen. Without giving it away, this film contains one of the greatest endings in the history of cinema. It is a detonation of restraint. It is what happens when the body, long denied, finally breaks into expression. Watching it feels like being let in on something private, indecipherable, yet universal. Like watching someone dream aloud.