Winner of 82 international awards, Pvt. Ravel’s Bolero is an anti-war “filmic poem” and historical documentary wrapped in WWI and the music of Maurice Ravel. Based on the poem by author and filmmaker JZ Murdock, this film comes from LgN Productions.

The story centers on Joseph Maurice Ravel — later celebrated as France’s greatest composer — and his time in WWI as a truck driver. Through poetry, music, and imagery, the film imagines Ravel composing Bolero in the trenches, exploring the effect it might have had on both the living and the dead.

When WWI began, Ravel longed to serve and to experience adventure. Pvt. Ravel’s Bolero is not just about his most famous musical work, but about the experience of war itself. It asks: What if Ravel had written Bolero during his service in “The Great War” — as it was called before the world began numbering its wars?

This is also a filmic experience: a meditation on how war overwhelms perception. The pace is sometimes too fast to read, too much to fully assimilate. What you see and hear may feel imperfect, even unsettling — not because it is too graphic, but because it is raw and unvarnished. Some scenes are included precisely because they have rarely, if ever, been shown publicly: too flawed, too real to fit into conventional history.

For such is war.