Michel Hazanavicius had long wanted to make a film about the grisly Chechen conflict, even before his light-hearted silent comedy tribute "The Artist."
The playful black-and-white film starring his wife Berenice Bejo rode a wave of buzz to a best picture win at the 2012 Academy Awards.
Yet Hazanavicius remained committed to his dream of directing a dark war movie.
"'The Artist' was so unexpected -- what happened after the movie -- so I was very happy to have something to work on that is very different and very challenging for me," Hazanavicius said in an interview at last fall's Toronto International Film Festival.
In "The Search," opening in select cities across Canada on Friday, Bejo stars as a European Union employee who forges an unlikely bond with a nine-year-old orphaned boy. Meanwhile, a young man forced to join the Russian army slowly loses his humanity.
The French director said it was important to him to zero in on individual human stories, set against the horrific backdrop of the Second Chechen War in 1999.
"It's about Chechnya, but it's about human beings. It's about people," said Hazanavicius.
"It's about the Chechnyan war but it could be somewhere else."
Bejo said she was proud of her husband for not abandoning his idea after winning Oscars for best picture and best director for "The Artist." She said "The Search" was not the easiest film he could have made next.
"I think as an artist you're happy to be able to do movies that talk about something that actually happened -- and to in a way take a position about something that actually happened," she said.
Bejo was born in Argentina but grew up in France, and has two children with Hazanavicius. She said her husband began writing the script with a central character named Carole, and turned to her and said, "It's going to be you."
But she found the character challenging at first. Bejo has many scenes with a nine-year-old boy who does not speak, because he is so deeply traumatized by the war and the loss of his family.
"I'm always talking, talking and nobody's ever answering me," she said -- in an ironic twist after silent film "The Artist."
Hazanavicius said he would consider the film "political," as it also focuses on Carole's failed attempts to convince others at the E.U. to pay attention to the ongoing atrocities.
"You can't take that kind of a subject and believe that you're not doing something political," he said.
"There's the question of what Europe can do -- should we do some kind of intervention in that situation? It's a very complex thing. I don't have any solution.
"But the fact is: we often don't do anything, because of our indifference."
