The Minister for Transport, Bertrand Saint-Jean, is woken in the middle of the night by his personal private secretary. A bus has crashed into a ravine. He goes there, he has no choice. Thus begins the odyssey of a State official through an increasingly complex and hostile world. Speed, power struggles, chaos, economic crisis… In the frantic chain of events, one emergency replaces another. What sacrifices are men ready to accept? How long will they last in a State that devours those who serve it? "I've been working on this project for 7 years. Originally, I wanted to address the invisible nature of power and show the people behind the scenes of government because these are people who are pulling the strings and yet we never see them. It was very important for me to show that political decision are thought up by a whole group of people, although one person alone approves the decision in the end. So the original idea for the film lies in the relationship between the principal private secretary and the minister. The PPS epitomizes the man who never gets any media attention but who gets his hands dirty. So it's a film not so much about "the president's men" as about "the minister's men", says director Pierre Schoeller.
