André Rochat was already in his late thirties when he embarked on his first mission for the ICRC. A self-made man with no university degree, he had already reached the upper echelons of the international luxury hotel business. Yet in the ICRC's invitation he sensed the irresistible call of adventure and swapped wall-to-wall carpeting for desert sands. His new "guests" would be the victims of the civil war that had been raging in Yemen since the toppling of the monarchy in 1962.
Rochat adapted extremely well to the ancestral customs of the desert. He put his organisational talents to work for the ICRC's tent hospital and discovered a flair for humanitarian diplomacy that repeatedly hit home in lounges throughout the Middle East. In the timeless, breathtaking setting of the Yemeni mountains and desert, the ICRC and its numerous delegates instilled respect for the wounded, for civilians and for prisoners of war throughout the long, cruel conflict. But as Rochat took ever bolder initiatives, relations between headquarters and the delegation he headed with steely determination grew gradually more tense. The split came in Athens in 1970, when Rochat succeeded alone in freeing hostages taken by Palestinian hijackers aboard a Greek airliner.
Rochat not only kept all his archives, but also the many pictures and considerable film footage he had taken. These enrich the film's riveting account of his adventures in the Arabian peninsula.

At the time of the war, Max Récamier was a young surgeon trained in France. His colleague and friend, Pascal Grellety-Bosviel, had interned in France and the US. Together they discovered wartime medicine at the Ukd hospital, where the French Red Cross sent them to help the ICRC in 1964. Both men burned with impatience to get near the front and to go in small teams to treat the combatants in the royalist-held mountains. After three months working with no supervision in the imam's entourage, they had to pass through the front lines to save their skin, carrying a Red Cross flag as their only means of protection.
Four years later they returned to Yemen as part of the ICRC medical team that set up in a cave to escape bombing by the republican air force.
Convinced of the importance of humanitarian medicine, they accepted an ICRC mission to Biafra the following year. Together with nearly a dozen other French doctors, they founded an NGO specialising in medical aid. The organisation, Doctors Without Borders, has since become world-famous.

Pascal Grellety-Bosviel took arresting pictures and painted magnificent aquarelles during his missions.

Carlos Bauverd retraced André Rochat's journeys through the desert twenty years later and was able to gauge the lasting impact of the mission leader's action in Islamic territory. Himself a delegate and head of delegations in Yemen, as well as elsewhere in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, he had the privilege of discovering the top layers of the ICRC in Geneva from the inside: at the end of his career he was appointed head of communications, before he too slammed the door on the organisation.
Carlos Bauverd knows all the ins and outs of the ICRC mission to the Middle East, and he unlocks them one by one with irony-tinged astuteness and distance. Thanks to him, in particular, the film rises above the paths of individuals and reveals the largely unfamiliar mechanisms of humanitarian strategy.

Jean-Paul Hermann served as a nurse in the latter years of the ICRC mission to Yemen. He replaced André Rochat at the Committee's base camp in Saudi Arabia and at the mission headquarters in Sanaa, where he helped set up a rehabilitation centre for the handicapped. The centre has grown to become a major hospital.
Mr Hermann provides insights into Rochat's day-to-day activities. His account is marked by admiration for his predecessor and is delivered with a good touch of humour.

Betty Jayet was a young Lebanese employee of the ICRC delegation to Amman during the Zarka hijacking in September 1970. She married a member of the delegation, René Jayet.

Franziska Stamm was a young nurse from Bern sent by the Swiss Red Cross to the Ukd hospital. She returned to Yemen on other missions and also worked in Biafra.

Jimmy Parramore, an American anaesthetist, had settled in Switzerland after serving as a pilot in the Korean War. His account of the ICRC medical team holed up in the Jijannah cave, in 1968, reveals his talent for communicating with civilian victims of the pounding by the republican air force. At the time, even on the royalist side women seemed unfazed by the re1igious fundamentalism that has since taken hold of nearly the entire republican territory.

A Franco-Swiss press photographer, Yves Debraine had already witnessed war twenty years earlier. But this conflict was like no other. He persuaded André Rochat to let him go along to the Yemeni mountains to look for the imam who commanded the royalist troops. Debraine was thus able to illustrate every step of this quest for the humanitarian Ho1y Grail: the mission leader's reception by the king, hunkering down in a cave, and his agreement to the idea of protecting prisoners under the Geneva Conventions.