Yahoo News ‘Athena’ Trailer: Paris Is Seething In Romain Gavras’ Netflix Drama; Director Talks Immersive Modern Tragedy – Venice
EXCLUSIVE: Romain Gavras’ Athena will have its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on September 2, and we’ve got a first-look at the trailer for the immersive modern tragedy from Netflix — check it out above. Following Athena’s Lido bow, it will be released globally on Netflix September 23.
Athena is the third feature from Gavras, here teaming with previous collaborator Elias Belkeddar and longtime friend Ladj Ly (Les Misérables) on writing duties. Ly and Gavras are also producers.
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The story begins just after the death of a young boy, in unexplained circumstances, throwing his three brothers and the whole of the eponymous Athena housing project outside Paris into chaos.
Netflix
In a star-making turn, Dali Benssalah plays Abdel, a soldier in the French army who is called back from the frontline after the death of his youngest brother following an alleged police altercation, and finds his family torn apart. Caught between his younger brother Karim’s (Sami Slimane) desire for revenge and the criminal dealings of his older brother Moktar (Ouassini Embarek), he struggles to calm the rising tensions. As the situation escalates, their community, Athena, is transformed into a fortress under siege, becoming a scene of tragedy for both the family and beyond.
Gavras recently told Deadline the film was “imagined as a Greek tragedy, and ultimately the tragedy is a kind of inexorable advance towards chaos.” The filmmaker said the script was born “with a simple idea of being inside a spark that could set the nation ablaze in real time.”
The film includes several extended, complex single-shot takes, and Gavras explained that cast and crew rehearsed for eight weeks before filming across 52 days outside the French capital — and without CGI. “The fights are real, the pyrotechnics are real,” he told me, adding, “It’s always difficult to create an impression of chaos and hysteria and violence,” but there was “an almost military organization” to the process.
The film embraces both the epic and the personal. “We conceived of it and choreographed it almost like an opera, but always in a very realistic way so that the choreography isn’t felt,” Gavras explained. “There is a heightened reality with very strong symbolism — almost mythological shots — layered onto the present to create a sort of timeless war.”
With a tight running time of 97 minutes, Athena’s intention is to take the viewer by the throat and keep them bound. “When you do a film for a platform, you don’t have the right to be tiresome one single second. I think you have to catch people and not let them go,” Gavras said, praising Netflix who “really let me do and pushed me to do the film we wanted to do from script stage.”
Added Gavras, Athena is “a story of brotherhood and this familial violence that is going to overflow the neighborhood and then the country. In civil wars, it’s that: brother against brother, family against family and then nation against nation.”
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