A MEDIUM
Brussels, May 2025
A filmmaker and reserve captain in the French Army, RACHEL LANG speaks about cinema with the same sense of duty she applies to military life: commitment as vocation, obsession as necessity. Her new film, Mata, folds those parallel identities into a tense espionage thriller haunted by absence, solitude, and invisible wounds.
The film follows a DGSE agent (played by Eye Haïdara) wounded during a covert mission in Niger who returns to France convinced her superiors are concealing the truth about her partner’s disappearance. As a counter-espionage investigation in the Alps begins to echo the ambush overseas, Mata spirals into a paranoid search for answers where loyalty, grief, and identity begin to fracture.
In conversation with SHADOWPLAY, Lang reflects on war, artistic compulsion, motherhood and the strange emptiness that follows creation – revealing an artist deeply drawn to the fragile space between discipline and emotional collapse.
Left Full look Janue
Right Shirt Janue, necklace Olim Brussels
You admitted to me that you had insomnia the night before our photo shoot, and you told me, “I never let go.” What does that mean?
It’s about the way I was raised, about commitment. Your word means something. When you commit, you follow through. It’s only in the past few years, because I have children and my partner doesn’t share the same vision of commitment that I do, that I’ve learned to let go of certain things.
How can someone be both a film director and a reserve captain?
I’ve had one foot in the military for more than twenty years, long before I started making films. I was 19 during my first military experience, and I entered film school at 21. Cinema moves very slowly: writing, developing, and financing a feature takes years. When everything finally comes together, there’s no room for anything else. Prep, shooting, and post-production leave no space for a military life on top of civilian life. But for me, that only happens once every five years. The rest of the time, being an independent writer gives me a great deal of freedom.
I’ve directed three feature films: in 2014, 2019, and 2025. Those years were entirely devoted to cinema. But between those productions, I spent a lot of time in the army. I need to feel useful in society, to feel I serve a purpose between creative periods. During the years of the terrorist attacks — 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018 — reservists were heavily mobilised, and I was happy to be able to step up.
After our day of shooting, you told me it had been a challenge. You said, “I’m a medium — photos weren’t exactly a given.” Why?
I’m a way of mediating an object, a thought, a sensation — the project that will become a film. I’m a medium in the same way that a screenplay is a medium for the film: something that disappears once the final object exists. When the film is finished, it becomes independent from me; it has its own life. It’s like a mother and her child — you’re just a bridge. So I’m not used to being the object of attention, unlike an actor who has the ability to step into a role.
Dress Marie Adam-Leenaerdt
And in the army?
In the army, when you lead a group, it’s to take them somewhere, toward a goal greater than leadership itself. You’re only one link in a chain. You’re never really in control; you’re relaying orders that come from above. You truly are a medium.
Mata comes out in a few days. How do you come out of a film?
I miss the bone to chew on — the next thing. After being obsessed every minute of my life with solving every detail of the screenplay, casting, scouting, shooting, post-production… I enter a phase of dizzying emptiness, almost depressive. There’s also the denial of anxiety: how will the film be received? Will audiences go see it?
Is that feeling comparable to coming back from a mission?
No, not at all. In cinema, death is not a working hypothesis. If you make a terrible film, well… too bad. The disaster is industrial, not human. In war, the mission is shaped by that anxiety, and returning is a relief when everyone comes back alive.
Left Dress Julie Ancel, vintage shoes
Right Full look Jean-Paul Knott
How do you want to bounce back from that state?
I want to enjoy my family, which is what I’ve been doing since the end of post-production. And I also have three projects in development, but I don’t yet know which one I’ll start first. Until now, the films followed one another out of obviousness and necessity. Baden Baden was supposed to be the third part of a trilogy, but it became my first feature. Then, for Our Men (Mon Légionnaire), I was already writing during Baden Baden. I had met legionnaires’ wives and spent years building relationships to understand that world. Again, directing it felt inevitable. And with Mata, it happened the same way. The desire came before I had even finished shooting the previous film. I wanted to make an espionage thriller, and I started researching shadow soldiers. Since only one out of five films generally gets made, I’ve been lucky enough to direct the first three scripts I wrote. Those first three films were absolutely necessary for me. I would have written them even without money.
Why was Mata necessary for you?
Ah! You have to understand that this is a very thankless profession. Nobody is waiting for us. You have to fight for a film to exist. So if you’re not stubborn, almost pathologically attached to your subjects, nothing gets made.
This project was extremely important to me. I think it’s the most intimate of the three films. That’s why I had to hide it beneath the mask of an action movie. What’s strange right now is that the trailer and poster present it as an espionage thriller — which it is. But that form is really just a pretext to portray commitment and solitude. If Mata comes back with a physical wound, she also carries an invisible wound. She’s lost part of her soul, and it puts her commitment at risk.
Left Full look Jean-Paul Knott
Right Vintage dress Yves Saint Laurent
What would your next subject be? Your next necessity?
I need something lighter. I’m coming out of two hard films, and I’d like to move toward something more buoyant, more comedic. The most developed of the three projects at this stage would be a Christmas comedy — a kind of verbal jousting match between lots of very different people in a family, plus outsiders brought into it. I want an explosive, deep, but funny and luminous chamber piece. And at the same time, I learned so much making Mata that I’d also love to make another espionage film. Every film is a prototype, but what I learned from this last one makes me want to go back, armed with those lessons, and push even further.
Are the subjects of your films inspired by real life?
Yes. I’m always inspired by reality — through my own experiences or through encounters, people, stories, and experiences that have left a mark on me.
You give off something mysterious. Are you constantly observing?
Maybe mystery is just another word for modesty. But it’s true that everything interests me. The present moment interests me as material. I observe gestures, the way the person across from me holds their coffee cup, the way a painter would observe light entering a room. I’m interested in existing beauty, probably because I want to reproduce it.
Vintage trench coat Yves Saint Laurent, skirt Essentiel
You once told me you were surprised, after returning from a mission, to realise you had underestimated being a woman — someone without the same physical strength as a man. How did this second profession enter your life?
At 19, I was studying philosophy. I wanted to go shoot a documentary in Brazil, but I was missing €700 to pay for my plane ticket. A friend told me, “Hey, if you join the army for two weeks, you’ll make €700.” I went very naively, signing a reservist contract without knowing it came with a hundred-kilo gear pack. During basic training, I felt as though my field of vision suddenly opened 360 degrees. Before that, I had only been surrounded by intellectuals or left-wing artists. Suddenly, I found myself with people my age whom I would never have met in civilian life.
In that artillery regiment, we became “brothers,” digging trenches to protect ourselves from plaster grenades, living through intense experiences where you barely sleep, barely eat, where you’re exhausted and everything feels heightened. You come out of it with a strength you find nowhere else. The collective pushes you so far beyond yourself that you surpass all your own limitations.
Compared to the world of thought — where, in philosophy school, I found solitary joy in Spinoza — I couldn’t see what concrete role I could play in society. I didn’t know what use I was. In the army, they quickly taught us how to make a tourniquet, evacuate the wounded, perform CPR — so many things that made you feel useful because you were developing real skills. I knew nothing about the military world. I had never seen a war movie. I felt like everyone was playing a role. It was exotic and fascinating. The real missions came years later. Today, I’m on pause.
Are you patriotic?
I don’t know. But I do have a funny anecdote. I was preparing for my staff diploma when I became pregnant with my first daughter. It’s a one-year course, two days a month at the military academy in Paris. Every month, I came back to school, and my classmates would tease me because my uniform was getting too tight: “With a due date on July 14th, you’re going to call her France!”
That same year, I presented a film (Our Men) at Cannes on July 15th. The festival had been moved from May to July because of Covid in 2021. My daughter waited a few extra days before arriving. She was born halfway between the French national holiday and the Belgian national holiday. Her name is France, and the second one is named Philippine.
Left Vintage full look
Right Vintage dress Yves Saint Laurent
A female director. A female army captain. Is it complicated?
The difficulty isn’t the same. In the army, there’s no sex: rank comes before gender. Cinema is very military in the way it functions, but very civilian in its social codes. It’s less structured. Of course, there are abuses in both environments, but the military world is much better equipped to deal with them because collective life between men and women is treated as a real issue.
The film industry only recently introduced training and awareness sessions before shoots to prevent sexual and sexist misconduct — more than ten years after the army did. I was the sexual harassment and violence officer in my regiment between 2015 and 2020. Problems there are much easier to handle because you don’t have the industrial repercussions you have in cinema.
How do you work with your actors to bring them where you want them to go? Do you consider them a family? And there too, do you never let go?
No. Unlike the army, I wouldn’t say it’s a family. Actors exist separately from the crew. A family with them has to be built, manufactured, shaped — unlike the relationships with technicians.
For my last two films, I put the actors through immersion camps. For Our Men, Louis Garrel had to live with his fellow actors among real legionnaires for three days and three nights. He slept on a camp bed, ate combat rations, did push-ups, crawled, carried loads, sang, marched in formation — he experienced a little of the harshness and collective life of the military before embodying his role.
For Mata, four actors — Eye Haïdara, Joséphine Japy, Raphaël Personnaz, and Franck Morand — who play intelligence officers, went through a clandestine initiation course inspired by DGSE training. They crossed Paris for three days and three nights with no credit card, no ID, no phone, carrying out missions day and night, every hour. We were lucky enough to be supervised by a former DGSE instructor who recreated part of the recruitment tests used to put young candidates through their paces before becoming secret agents. They push you outside your comfort zone, they exhaust you, to see how you react. It’s extremely intense. I did it alongside them because the idea was also to create a family, to try to understand one another, and for them to experience what adrenaline feels like — what it means to live in the skin of someone undercover.
Shirt Janue, bracelet Olim Brussels
Are you yourself a secret agent?
Of course not. But I do have a double life because of my two professional worlds. They’re very sealed off from one another, which often gives me the feeling of being undercover in each world.
Has becoming a mother changed your projects?
Yes, it changes a lot of things. Time no longer has the same value. In fact, I waited to do certain things I wanted to achieve before becoming a mother — things I wouldn’t do anymore now.
It profoundly changes your vision of the world. You no longer tolerate the same things once you become a mother, and I admire women more than anything. What changed the most is my relationship to war.
How did it shift?
There were several ruptures, but I keep thinking about one significant moment.After breastfeeding my eldest daughter for six months, my period returned during her seventh month. A woman’s period means: okay, you’re ready to make another child. I had just experienced the cycle of creating a child — nine months of pregnancy and six months of breastfeeding — and I was absolutely not ready to go through it again.
That first day my period came back was also day one of the war in Ukraine. These soldiers — still children themselves — going to die in Ukraine. That image stayed with me. I was hormonally shattered by postpartum: joy, strength, fragility, sadness — everything mixed together into quite a cocktail. Meanwhile, after spending seven months caring for a baby 24/7, there was war. What a lack of respect for women’s labour. It felt indecent, intolerable. These eighteen-year-olds sent to the front as cannon fodder are the result of their mothers’ labour. All that work thrown away? Seriously? With one political decision? It was unbearable.
I had only done an infinitesimal part of the job of being a mother — the first months of life. And the eighteen years still ahead felt like such an immense task. The announcement of the war in Ukraine changed everything inside my postpartum mother’s brain. Before, I saw things from the point of view of the child — autonomous, over eighteen, living their life. Suddenly, through motherhood, I shifted into another status entirely, one that changed my perspective and my vision. Motherhood changes your centre of gravity.
Mata hits theatres on May 27, 2026.
Interview and photography by Lydie Nesvadba
Make-up Jill Wertz