Polish helmers Sylwia Witowska and Piotr Wacowski are in mid-production on After Roll Call. Legio Patria Nostra, a feature documentary set inside a French Foreign Legion veterans’ home in Puyloubier, in the south of France.
Produced by Vicky Witowska and Sylwia Witowska through PLAN V, the project is planned as an 80–90-minute Polish production, with France as the shooting location. The pic has a total budget of €670,000, with €180,000 currently secured from PLAN V and a private investor. It is being presented at Millennium Docs Against Gravity’s Progress Pitching Session on May 8, where the team is looking for sales agents, distributors, VoD platforms, festivals, broadcasters, co-producers and sponsors.
Despite its military setting, the filmmakers are positioning After Roll Call not as a film about war, but as a study of identity after structure. The project’s central question is what happens to a person when the institution that has defined their body, habits, language and sense of purpose begins to disappear.
“This is not a film about war,” the project materials state. “It is about what happens to a person when the system that shaped them no longer exists.”
The film is built around the Foreign Legion as an extreme case of institutional belonging. The Legion is described as one of the world’s most rigorous military systems, where daily life is governed by control, discipline and repetition, and where individuality is surrendered to the institution. The veterans’ home, by contrast, becomes a space “in between”: between past and present, between structure and its absence, between old rituals and the emptiness of civilian life.
The documentary follows two parallel narrative threads. One observes elderly legionnaires who spent much of their lives inside the system and are now trying to redefine themselves after leaving it. The other follows young recruits entering the Legion today, at the moment when they begin to lose their individuality and become part of the institution. Together, these strands are intended to reveal a full cycle: entering the system, belonging to it and living after it.
The core of the film lies in the veterans’ home in Puyloubier, which becomes both location and metaphor. Its architecture, routines and rituals impose a rhythm on the film, while the bodies of the former soldiers carry the memory of discipline long after active service has ended. The filmmakers say they are not interested in telling the history of the institution itself, but in portraying the people shaped by it.
At the heart of the doc are several characters, each representing a different strategy for surviving life after the system. Gąsior, a former Polish legionnaire, forms the emotional backbone of the project. Born in the Bieszczady Mountains, he joined the Legion after leaving Poland in search of work and meaning. He rose quickly through the ranks, but after seven years of service suffered a serious accident during training when ammunition exploded nearby, leaving him with head injuries, post-traumatic epilepsy and neurological damage.
After failed attempts to rebuild his life in Paris and Poland, Gąsior eventually arrived at the veterans’ home, which he now describes as a “return to family” — the only world that still has meaning for him. He struggles with PTSD, alcohol addiction and the loss of contact with his daughter, now serving in the French Navy. Unable to speak directly about his experience, he sculpts faceless soldiers from clay and tree branches in the ceramics workshop. His distorted, unfinished figures become a way of communicating what language cannot hold: the collapse of an identity built on function, discipline and belonging.
Another protagonist, Christoph, is a wheelchair-user whose life has been marked by addiction, homelessness and family conflict. He survives on very limited income, supplemented by Legion support, and fills his private space with disorder, in contrast to the military symmetry around him. His black humour, complaints and absurd gestures function as psychological armour, masking loneliness and failure.
Alex, who grew up in an orphanage, attempts to rebuild meaning through his relationship with his adopted dog, Gingo, whom he treats almost like a child. The bond is tender but fragile, revealing a man emotionally on the edge, trying to replace institutional belonging with attachment. David, a former legionnaire and paratrooper of Polish origin born in Djibouti, offers a quieter alternative: sober for several years, he works as a bartender in the veterans’ home, serving alcohol to others while refusing it himself.
The film also features László, a Hungarian former Legion commander and long-time standard-bearer, who remains trapped inside the institution’s myth. Once active in the anti-communist opposition in Hungary, he continues to live through ritual, symbols and memories of service, while paying a high personal price in his family life. Père Yannick Lallemand, the long-serving military chaplain of the Foreign Legion, functions as a spiritual counterpoint: a figure of continuity, ritual and sacrifice in a world where those meanings are no longer available to many of the men around him.
The filmmakers describe the film’s dramaturgy as a map of survival strategies. Gąsior rebuilds identity through art; David through sobriety; Christoph through absurdity; Alex through emotional attachment; László through myth; and Père Lallemand through ritual and spiritual continuity. Together, they form a portrait of “life after the system”.
The film’s visual and narrative strategy is rooted in observation. Witowska and Wacowski plan to avoid explanatory narration and conventional interviews, instead allowing meaning to emerge from spaces, gestures, repetition and duration. The contrast between Legion ritual and the private lives of the veterans will create the film’s dramatic tension without imposing a classical narrative structure.
The project’s visual language is deliberately restrained: static frames, slow rhythm, natural light, minimal coverage and a refusal of overt narrative manipulation. The directing duo cite contemplative observation, formal composition and the physicality of labour as reference points, with titles such as Into Great Silence, The Truffle Hunters and In the Basement mentioned in the project materials.
Colour and texture are also central to the film’s design. The red and green of the Legion’s banner, the earthy clay tones of the ceramics studio, the golden glow of relics and the stark geometry of military spaces are intended to contrast with the physical fragility of the veterans. Museum objects and ceremonies appear as preserved myths, “relics of belonging”, while the Provençal landscape around Puyloubier creates a visual contradiction: natural beauty that does not necessarily bring relief.
The filmmakers stress that their access is rare and long-term, extending both to active Legion environments and training, and to the veterans’ home. This allows them to observe both the formation of identity and what remains when that identity begins to dissolve.
Although the Foreign Legion is an extreme case, the project aims for a broader resonance. “Today, more and more people experience the loss of structure through burnout, instability, ageing, or changing social systems,” the directors say. “We live in a moment when systems we once took for granted begin to crumble. And we are all learning how to exist without them.”
