Use the search bar to find projects, completed films, and TFL community members.

Projects

Grand Ciel

On stormy nights, a Babelian construction site swallows its workers one by one.

synopsis

Vincent, a 30-year-old iron bender who lives with Camille and her son, works at night on the construction site of the biggest shopping mall in Europe, Grand Ciel. He hangs onto his new job even if the work is hard and dangerous, because he believes that his family’s future depends on it. After a night of flooding on the construction site, one of his team mates is missing. Vincent’s colleagues argue that workers often leave without giving notice. When another worker vanishes, Vincent suspects that Lobbo, the team leader, has concealed deadly accidents. He begins to investigate, but when Lobbo disappears in turn, Vincent starts to believe in what some say: Grand Ciel swallows workers on stormy nights. Soon after he is offered Lobbo’s position, Camille tells him that she is pregnant. But even with this new job, and the promise of stability, Vincent begins to fear being swallowed too.

Director’statement

Grand Ciel is a place that will bring together hundreds of shops, flats, museums, an urban farm, an amusement park and even a ski slope. Advertising promises that you will not need to leave Grand Ciel to live the life you have always dreamed of. This so-called utopia or tower of Babel is constructed by thousands of precarious workers who work in shifts night and day. One of them, Vincent has to sacrifice his everyday life with his family to build a place that represents a better future he might never have access to. To embody this paradox, we intend to deal with the site of Grand Ciel as a living being. Workers erect, without knowing it, a place that wakes up on stormy nights and swallows them one by one to keep on growing. Grand Ciel is a film that starts from a social, realistic and slightly futuristic perspective, then slides towards fantasy. The construction site, this microcosm seems to gradually transform itself into a “monster” which comes from an imagery of horror cinema and echoes the fear that we feel haunts Western society today. We build without knowing why or for whom, as if it were an act of survival because the future looks deceptive, opaque or just frightening as hell.

TFL PROGRAMME:
ScriptLab 2018
Discover more details here:
Download
PDF
TFL Catalogue 2018

All the updates once a month in your mailbox, subscribe to the TFL newsletter.