L'arbre et la forêt (2010)

In [year unspecified], Frédérick Muller, an Alsatian-born forester from the Loiret, taciturn and passionate about Wagner, does not attend the funeral of his eldest son, Charles, leaving his family bewildered and angry, especially his youngest son, Guillaume. A few weeks later, he decides to explain his actions during a family meal. Charles, his deceased son, knew the secret his father had kept since the Second World War. As a young man, Frédérick had been imprisoned for more than a year in 1941 at the Schirmeck camp in Alsace—not for political opinions, as the family legend had claimed for 50 years, but under the French authorities’ application of the discriminatory laws and deportation measures against homosexuals under Paragraph 175 of the German penal code. Knowing the truth, Charles had since despised his father and had ordered him to keep the secret and not attend his funeral. Marianne, his wife, who had always known the truth, had accepted the situation and, despite everything, had built a family with the man she loved, whom she allowed to lead a parallel love life. The revelation shocks Guillaume and Delphine, Charles’s daughter. Finally freed from this terrible secret, Frédérick shares with Delphine and her partner Rémi, on the eve of the December 1999 storm, his memories of life at the Schirmeck camp. He explains that he survived that period—when he wondered every day whether he would be arbitrarily executed—and that deportation, which he considers an “absolute absurdity,” only because he kept alive in his mind each day the hope of seeing a tree grow, which he promised himself he would plant if he ever got out of the camp alive. He did so as soon as he was released one morning, for no apparent reason.