Grand Ciel

Synopsis

Vincent, la trentaine, travaille dans une équipe de nuit sur le chantier de Grand Ciel, une cité futuriste et providentielle. La cadence est infernale et les conditions difficiles mais Vincent s’accroche à la perspective d’un avenir meilleur. Quand deux de leurs collègues disparaissent, Vincent et les autres suspectent leur chef de dissimuler des accidents. Alors que d’étranges phénomènes font leur apparition sur le chantier, ce dernier disparait à son tour…

In english dans le texte
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.

Intention
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.