Rats of Tobruk

Autumn 1941. The fortress of Tobruk has been under siege for months, and the section of the perimeter nobody else wants has been handed to the Polish Carpathian Brigade. Enemy radio calls them rats, burrowing in the sand. The name sticks, and the men keep it.

One night, five of them go out. Sergeant Józef Lis leads the patrol into no man's land to bring back a wounded Australian signaller before first light. It should take two hours. It takes the whole night.

Between the minefields and the wire they do what soldiers do: they talk. About Lwów. About the families left behind in September 1939. About whether anyone at home will ever learn where they fought, or whether this will be one of those campaigns that falls out of the history books because it happened too far away, in the wrong desert, under someone else's flag.

The film reconstructs a little-known chapter of the war from archival research and generative imagery, and it refuses the monument. No speeches, no swelling strings. Five men, a sand-coloured night, and a signaller who may or may not still be breathing when they reach him.