Beau Geste meets Waiting For Godo in this haunting adaptation of renowned Italian writer Dino Buzzati's controversial 1938 novel about life, honor, mystery, paranoia and death during wartime.

For his first commission, infantry lieutenant Drogo (Brotherhood of the Wolf's Jacques Perrin) is stationed at a remote desert garrison on the mist-shrouded border of the North Kingdom. Filling their days with endless drilling, the soldiers of Fortezza Bastiano spend the long nights wondering about an enemy no one has ever seen. As the days stretch into months, the strain of waiting for attack takes its toll on Drago's comrades: sadistic Major Mattis (Giuliano Gemma), sardonic Lieutenant Simeon (The Damned's Helmut Griem), cynical medic Rovine (The Conformist's Jean-Luis Tringnant) and humiliated Captain Hortiz (The Exorcist's Max Von Sydow), who lives with the shame of having once sounded the alarm against an attack that vanished before anyone could see.

Rarely screened outside of Europe since its 1976 premiere, Il Deserto dei Tartari (The Desert of the Tartars) was the last film from Italian director Valerio Zurlini before his death in 1982, and also features a legendary international cast Vittorio Gasman, Giuliano Gemma, Max Von Sydow, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Philippe Noiret, Fernando Rey, and Francisco Rabal.

A multi-national co-production, The Desert of the Tartars makes atmospheric use of Iran's 2000 year-old Barn Citadel where Zurlini and crew filmed on the eve of the 1979 revolution that changed world politics forever. As timely now as the day it was made, The Desert of the Tartars is a study of the madness of warfare in the tradition of All Quiet on the Western Front and Apocalypse Now.