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IFFR 2025 Bright Future

Review: Arenas

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- With a first feature mixing together the initiatory journey and a genre film flavour, Camille Perton lifts the veil on the dark manoeuvres revolving around young professional football talent

Review: Arenas
Iliès Kadri and Sofian Khammes in Arenas

“Everything can be sold, at the right price.” With the rapid expansion of the “trading” economic model in the world of international football, the waltz of transfers has gotten carried away, with each club betting on fast potential gain thanks to the buying and reselling of young talent found in training centres. It’s in the heart of that system of backstage negotiations, which attracts the envy of countless intermediaries of more or less ambiguous status (agents, advisers, lawyers, relatives, etc.) and far away from the purity of the childhood dreams of football lovers, that French director Camille Perton has chosen to plunge her debut fiction feature, Arenas, screened as an international premiere in the Bright Future section of the 54th International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR).

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“There are stakes that are not in your control.” Brahim (Iliès Kadri) is 18 and has a well established aptitude as a striker at the training centre of the Olympique Lyonnais, but the pressure is rising: he must sign his first professional contract. Managed by his affectionate and sympathetic cousin Mehdi (Sofian Khammes), the young man, under the mask of laconic confidence, is very worried about his immediate future. His questions are fed further by the size of the sums being discussed (between €350,000 and €700,000 annually, and between €1 and €2 million as bonus upon signing) and slide towards muted anxiety when his training club favours another teammate advised by Francis (Edgar Ramirez), a Colombian intermediary who seems to master all the occult mysteries of the transfer market and methodically weaves his net in order to get his hands on Brahim… What choice will the young man make? Will he turn his back on Mehdi? Will he make the best sports decision for his future as a football player? Will he give in to the sirens on a dangerous chessboard, between lies and false appearances, whose rules and shortcuts he progressively discovers?

Leaving the playing fields completely out of frame in favour of the locker rooms and the cars, restaurants, nightclubs and yachts, Camille Perton (who also wrote the script) explores the behind-the-scenes of professional football, yet without approaching it in a hyper-realist mode. Indeed, the filmmaker imbues the film with a film noir atmosphere, an imperceptibly threatening climate that mirrors the predatory Francis, between power and desire, and in an exacerbated capitalistic universe (“You want me? That’s my price.”) where trials and competition (sometimes tricked) are without sentiment. A hidden arena and a small shadowy theatre weathered by Martin Roux’s cinematography and which make for a film at once simple and singular, like a modern tale at the crossroads between the lust for luxury (and social climbing) and for the perverted innocence of the soul.

Arenas was produced by Les Films du Bal and co-produced by Auvergne Rhône-Alpes Cinéma. The French release is planned for 7 May by The Jokers and international sales are handled by Memento International.

(Translated from French)

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