A new film has thrown a spotlight on France’s elite military school, Saint-Cyr, more than a decade after a “testosterone fuelled” hazing ritual ended with the death of a brilliant army officer recruit.

Pour la France recounts the tragedy of Jallal Hami, 24, who drowned after officers ordered him and other new recruits to swim an icy lake in heavy gear during a midnight “exercise”.

The recruits entered the water to the sound of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries – a nod to Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now – playing from a speaker. Several had to be dragged out of the water, but the organisers insisted a second group, including Hami, attempt the 50-metre crossing.

The film, selected for last September’s Venice film festival and released to positive reviews on Wednesday, was made by the dead man’s brother, the film director Rachid Hami, who said it was not a settling of scores.

“Everybody covered the story of my brother’s death as a news event, but nobody told the real story of the young man who was my brother,” Rachid said. “This is a cinematic project inspired by Jallal’s story, it’s not a documentary, which would have been a cliche.”

He added: “I had great difficult going back over what happened and had to let time pass to clear my head because you cannot make a film in anger and I wanted this to be a great film, not one about rage or fury.”

Jallal, born in Algeria, was four when his mother, Hadjira, brought him and Rachid, then aged seven, to France in 1992 to escape the north African country’s civil war.

The family settled in the Paris suburb Seine-Saint-Denis, where Jallal excelled at school and went on to elite university Sciences Po, spending a year in Taiwan learning Mandarin. After graduating, he joined the Saint-Cyr military school in Brittany, founded in 1802 by Napoleon Bonaparte, which is the equivalent of the UK’s Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.

Hami was described as an “excellent” recruit and put on a fast track for a high-ranking army career. The risk of dying on a battlefield – Mort pour la France – was one he accepted, he told his family.

Hazing and similar initiation rites are banned in France, but on the night of 29 October 2012, Hami and other recruits were woken, ordered to dress and don helmets and were taken out to cross a lake where the water was 9C. It was an exercise in the “transmission of traditions”, they were told. When a first group got into difficulty they were thrown lifebelts but as a second group, including Hami, were halfway across, the spotlight illuminating the lake inexplicably went out and he disappeared. His body was found by firefighters several hours later.

Seven serving and former Saint-Cyr officers – including a general – went on trial for manslaughter in 2020. The state prosecutor said the hazing ritual, fuelled by “uncontrolled testosterone”, had descended into “madness”. Four officers were acquitted and three others given suspended sentences of between six and eight months.

The Hami family was doubly enraged to learn the convictions would not be registered on the men’s criminal records. “You have betrayed my brother again,” Rachid Hami said afterwards. “All he wanted was to serve France, the country that had welcomed him.”

French critics have praised Pour la France, selected for last September’s Venice film festival, as a thoughtful and moving treatment of a personal tragedy and what happens when ordinary people confront a closed, conservative and traditional institution such as the French military, nicknamed la grande muette (the great mute) for its silent closing of ranks.

Hami’s family felt he deserved the honour of an official funeral. The army at first refused, arguing he had not fallen in combat, but then relented and gave him a military send off. The young officer’s tricolor-draped coffin was then taken to Père-Lachaise cemetery, in Paris.

“Pour la France reenacts this confrontation, without going overboard, but by describing a complex field of forces and tensions, linked to the history of immigration, as well as to the wounds linked to identity,” wrote Le Monde.

Rachid said he is still angry with the individuals he holds responsible for his brother’s death, but not the military as a whole.

“I wanted to avoid the cliche of the immigrant, north African, Muslim family from the banlieue battling the army. There are already dozens of films like that,” he said. “Instead, this is the story of a young man and his adventures in life. It’s a family odyssey; a contemporary version of the Greek tragedy of Antigone.”

• This article was amended on 15 February 2023 because an earlier version said that Jallal Hami attended Sorbonne University. In fact the institution he attended was Sciences Po.