A young man is getting ready to fight at the front. On the battlefield and in the depths of the ditches, the recruits are dreading the order to attack. It’s war. The roar of explosions moving ever closer forebodes a spectacle of horror. Anxiety tightens its grip. The signal is given. The soldier leaps out of the trench and into a hellish expanse where the earth engulfs both the living and the dead as far as the eye can see.

Using brush and India ink to contemporize archival World War I images, Claude Cloutier pulls us into the inner reality of his protagonist through half real, half surrealistic scenes that reveal the symbolic importance of the earth. The Trenches is an intense cinematic experience, a powerful anti-war film that asks the question: Why? The dirty war that raged nearly one hundred years ago is no different from all those erupting today that reduce men and women to mere cannon fodder. Film without words.