WRITER/director David Oelhoffen’s feature film debut converts Albert Camus’s short story “L’H?te” into a comfortably-paced message film that presses the right buttons about moral and ethical issues that need no special stimulus to resonate.

In 1954, the war of independence is slowly eroding French hegemony in Algeria. At a small school in the Atlas Mountains, Daru (Viggo Mortensen) is teaching Arab children about French stuff. Two men arrive. One of them, escorting the other to the town of Tinguit to stand trial for murder, persuades Daru that he must take on that task. The man (Reda Kateb) remains silent. Daru offers hospitality. We are watching the beginnings of epiphanies for both men.

They set off on foot across a rock-strewn landscape so sere and blighted that at first it seems hateful. Nothing grows. How do people survive there? But survive they do. As the images become familiar to our senses, they become more magnificent. The film delivers a new meaning to the notion of figures in a landscape.

Men from the prisoner’s village on horseback are following to exact revenge for the murder of a family member. Later a group of guerrilla fighters stands across the pair’s path. We learn more about the prisoner. We learn more about Daru. We see a detachment of French troops obeying orders. We see understanding developing between Daru and the prisoner, whom we now know to be Mohamed, unlettered, innocent of most aspects of human life. And the crunch moment arrives, as it must, when they must separate.

The deeply moving story merits the attention of people of good will and compassion. The images are breathtaking.

At Palace Electric