16/09/2003

In March 2003 the Swiss boat Alinghi won the America's Cup, beating their nearest rivals from New Zealand. The filmmaker from Geneva, Nicolas Wadimoff, was on board the boat with his digital camera and he filmed the team training for the big race. These recordings have now been put together into a feature length film, which was released in Switzerland on August 27, 2003. Alinghi - The Inside Story covers this great sporting event from a backstage point of view, based in the very heart of the international team of sailors from Switzerland, France, New Zealand, Canada and America.

The film shows the all the crew, also revealing the technical problems they suffered during the race, the excesses of the competition, the hard blows and the paranoia of technical espionage. The director explains that the America's Cup "was closer to something out of dramatic fiction than a documentary. I wanted to make the film like an emotional thriller".

But on the other hand, Alinghi - The Inside Story also had rather a tough production process, from the ban on filming the races (the images had to be bought from New Zealand TV) to two edited versions prior to the one distributed in cinemas: one for a 52-minute report for the programme "Temps Présent" on TSR television, and a longer version of 137 minutes for the “Visions du Réel” Festival in Nyon.

(Translated from French)