Jean-François Stévenin

Our Longest Drive is a documentary about four guys who drive to the Arctic Circle to play golf. One of them is dead. The dead guy is along for the ride, his ashes precious cargo in a cherry wood box. Together, the men drive 5000 miles in an RV from Chicago to Inuvik, Northwest Territories, Canada - as far as the road will take them - to tee up on a three-hole grassless course at midnight of the summer solstice. Coping with health issues and all past retirement age, they have only two things in common - a love for each other and a history of having played golf together for over 20 years. Our Longest Drive is a documentary about friendship, adventure, aging, death and triumph. —Anonymous

In an airport, a mysterious man, known only as 'Lone Man' (Isaach De Bankole) is being instructed on his mission by another man known only by his alias Creole (Alex Descas). The mission itself is left unstated and the instructions are cryptic, including such phrases as "Everything is subjective," "The universe has no center and no edges; reality is arbitrary," and "Use your imagination and your skills." After the meeting at the airport, he travels to Madrid and then on to Seville, meeting several people in cafés and on trains along the way. The Lone Man's contacts include a middle-aged Frenchman (Jean-François Stévenin), a violin playing man (Luis Tosar), an adrogynist blonde British woman (Tilda Swinton), a Japanese woman (Yuki Kudo), and an elderly British man with a guitar (John Hurt). Each meeting has the same pattern: he orders two espressos at a cafe and waits, his contact arrives and in Spanish asks, "You don't speak Spanish, right?" in different ways, to which he responds, "No." The contacts tell him about their individual interests such as molecules, art, or film, then the two of them exchange matchboxes. A code written on a small piece of paper is inside each matchbox, which Lone Man reads and then eats. These coded messages lead him to his next rendezvous. One contact that Lone Man encounters repeatedly is a woman (Paz de la Huerta) who is always either completely nude or wearing only a transparent raincoat. She invites him to have sex with her but he declines, stating that he never has sex while he is working. One phrase that Creole, the man in the airport, tells him is repeated throughout the movie: "He who thinks he is bigger than the rest must go to the cemetery. There he will see what life really is: a handful of dirt." This phrase is sung in a peteneras flamenco song in a club in Seville at one point in his journey. In Almería, he is given a ride in a pickup truck - driven by a companion of the Mexican (Gael García Bernal) - on which the words La vida no vale nada ('life is worth nothing') are painted, a phrase Guitar says to him in Seville, and he is taken to Tabernas desert. There lies a fortified and heavily guarded compound. After observing the compound from afar, he somehow penetrates its defenses and waits for his target inside the target's office. The target, an American business (Bill Murray) asks how he got in, and he answers, "I used my imagination." After the assassination which the Lone Man kills the American with a guitar string, he drives back to Madrid, where he locks away the suit he has worn throughout the movie and changes into a sweatsuit bearing the national flag of Cameroon. Before exiting the train station onto a crowded sidewalk he throws away his last matchbox.

Jamie Shannon is a soldier of fortune, a mercenary who will stage a coup or a revolution for the right price. In 1980, Mercenaries Jamie Shannon (Christopher Walken), Drew (Tom Berenger), Derek (Paul Freeman), Michel (Jean-Francois Stevenin), Terry (Ed O'Neill) and injured Richard (Harlan Cary Poe) make a hasty exit from a war-torn Central American country by forcing their way onto a government civilian DC-3 airplane. When a Central American officer demands Richard's body to be removed to make room for others one of the mercenaries shows he is still able to safely grasp the spoon of a hand grenade and Drew insists his friend "goes home". The flight barely manages to take off from a make-shift runway before the rebels completely overrun the airport and kill everything and everybody that remained. Shannon lives a lonely life and doesn't have any friends. He lives alone in his apartment. After Shannon returns home to another night of loneliness, he is approached by a mysterious stranger who calls himself Andean. Endean (Hugh Millais) is a Briton who is interested in "certain resources" of a small African nation named Zangaro. Endean says that the investors he represents are willing to put up several hundred million dollars to extract the resources from Zangaro. Before money can be invested, they need to know much more about the stability of the regime. Endean pays Shannon $15,000 to go on a reconnaissance mission in Zangaro which is run by a paranoid and brutal dictator named General Kimba. Shannon arrives in Zangaro's capital of ClarenceTown, with a cover story of being an Ornithologist for a popular nature magazine back in the states. At the airport itself, a corrupt customs official takes half of everything Shannon has, like whiskey, cigarettes, porn and hard currency, before letting him into the country. He is given a lift into town by a catholic priest. Armed militia roam the streets, stopping vehicles, looking for an opportunity to make a quick bribe to avoid harassment. Shannon meets a British documentary filmmaker named Alan North (Colin Blakely) who tells him Zangaro's history and scouts out the defenses of the military garrison. North says that after independence there were 3 candidates for the President, namely Kima, Colonel Bobi and Dr Okoye. Okoye wanted to maintain links with the mother country. But the freedom fighters feared Neo-colonialism and thus Kimba got elected. A week later, he threw Okoye into prison and pushed Bobi into exile. Shannon activities, especially a suspected dalliance with a woman who turns out to be one of Kimba's mistresses, arouse the suspicions of Zangaro's police, and he is arrested, severely beaten and thrown in jail. His multiple wounds are treated by Dr. Okoye (Winston Ntshona), a physician who was formerly a moderate political leader and the only local politician of whom North approved but who was imprisoned by General Kimba four years ago. North agitates for his release and Shannon is deported after two days of torture. His physician tells him that all the damage he has sustained has taken years off his lifespan. After Shannon tells Endean that there is no chance of an internal coup Endean offers Shannon $100,000 to overthrow Kimba by invading Zangaro with a mercenary army. Endean intends to install a puppet government led by Colonel Bobi (George Harris), Kimba's brutal and greedy former ally. This would allow Endean to exploit the country's newly discovered platinum resources as Colonel Bobi has already signed away the mineral rights. Shannon refuses the offer and decides to leave his mercenary life behind. Shannon meets his estranged wife and proposes that they start a new life in Colorado or Montana. She turns him down noting that she does not think that he has changed. Shannon then accepts Endean's offer to organize an attack on Zangaro with the condition that he will have complete control of the operation. After Endean gives Shannon $1 million for expenses Shannon contacts his mercenary cohorts from Central America and three of them join him but one does not. They meet up at Liverpool Street Station to plan the coup and when all the options have been decided Michel proposes a toast followed by Shannon's reciting his motto "Everyone Comes Home". The group illegally procures Uzi sub-machine guns, ammunition, rocket launchers, mines and other weapons from arms dealers. He hires a small freighter and crew to transport the team to the coast of Zangaro and purchases a variety of other equipment that will be used in the attack such as Zodiac-style motorboats. By chance he encounters North who was expelled from Zangaro shortly after Shannon. North believes Shannon is a CIA agent heading back to Zangaro and tries to tail him. Shannon asks Drew to scare North away without hurting him but instead North is killed by someone who had been hired by Endean to follow Shannon and his crew. A furious Shannon kills him in turn and leaves his body at Endean's house during a dinner party held for Colonel Bobi. At sea the team is joined by a group of mercenary soldiers trained by a former mercenary colleague, Jinja, who will act as infantry. Once ashore in a night attack, the mercenaries and their troops use their array of weapons to attack the military garrison where Kimba lives. Drew bursts into a shack in the barracks' courtyard and finds only a young woman with a baby. When he turns to leave without harming them, she shoots him in the back with a pistol. After the mercenaries storm the burning, bullet-scarred ruins of the garrison, Shannon blasts his way into Kimba's mansion. There he finds the dictator stuffing packs of bills into a briefcase. When a whimpering Kimba offers Shannon some of the money to spare his life, Shannon kills him. The following morning, Endean arrives by helicopter with Colonel Bobi and they enter the presidential residence, where they find Shannon and Dr. Okoye awaiting their overdue arrival. Shannon introduces Dr. Okoye as Zangaro's new president who tells Colonel Bobi that he is under arrest, and when Endean protests. Shannon silences him by shooting Bobi. Shannon, Derek and Michel load Drew's body onto a Land Rover, in line with the toast they drank on planning the operation "Everyone comes home". The film concludes with the mercenaries driving through the deserted streets of Clarence until they are out of frame.