In Grand Ciel [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Akihiro Hata
scheda film], Damien Bonnard plays Vincent, working the night shift on the construction site for a place that’s supposed to be revolutionary – but for those trying to build it from scratch, not much is changing. To make things worse, their supervisors might be covering up an accident. But how can you rebel against something if you also need to survive? We spoke to Paris-based Japanese director Akihiro Hata about his Venice Orizzonti entry.

Cineuropa: Why the interest in these jobs? Did you reach out to any construction workers in real life as well?
Akihiro Hata: I come from a country where work occupies a fundamental place in people’s lives. It’s considered the foundation, the pillar, even the very identity of an individual. It’s what defines a person’s social value and even their human worth. One must be a soldier, a pawn contributing to the economic development of society and to its harmony. And this is especially true when it comes to precarious workers.

I have long been questioning the role of work in our lives. Before making Grand Ciel, I directed two medium-length films dealing with professional environments, too, and aiming to portray communities of workers: decontamination workers in the nuclear industry and farmers. Just like those films, this one is nourished by the many encounters and conversations I’ve had with them.

In your film, social drama morphs into a thriller. Were you afraid of mixing genres like this, or were you perhaps intrigued by it?
No, I wasn’t afraid at all – on the contrary, it was one of the driving creative forces for me. As a viewer, I have a particular admiration for movies that mix codes or genres, both from a narrative point of view, and from a visual and sonic one. It pushes us to dig deeper into reflections on what cinematic expression truly is, since the possibilities are endless. The blending of genres gave the film a great deal of freedom.

I said “thriller” because the building they are working on becomes scarier with every minute. It’s not a place of work; it’s a nightmare.
The construction site is the antagonist for all of the characters in the film. It evolves throughout the story. The concrete gradually comes to life; the site seems to transform into an organic place that threatens those who come to work there. I like the notion of a nightmare because we played with the ambiguity of how real the irrational events experienced on the site actually are. The threat we are talking about is not only physical, but also mental.

Can you tell us about Bonnard’s character? He’s crossing onto the dark side, but up until a certain point, his choices are understandable. He doesn’t have that many to begin with.
Vincent faces a constant dilemma throughout the film: morality versus his desire to escape precarity. He keeps pushing his limits to reach his goal, until there is no turning back. He belongs to a cinematic tradition of heroes marked by moral ambiguity, like Gaspard in The Hole [made in 1960] by Jacques Becker, for example.

I believe that we all carry a “Vincent” within us. In the world we live in, governed by a capitalist economy, we are increasingly confronted with this moral ambiguity, at different levels, in the context of work: individual logic versus collective logic. In a way, Vincent embodies the structural changes within industries, the diversification of recruitment practices and the evolution of values. Unlike his father’s generation – former factory workers who were laid off after choosing to fight collectively to save their jobs – union activism is finding less and less resonance among younger generations of workers like him. Individualism, it seems to me, is becoming more and more widespread.

Would you like to see any concrete changes in this world? You seem to be calling for it, but do you see yourself as an activist, too?
The issue of solidarity, cohesion and mutual support on a human scale seems to me more than crucial in today’s world. Individualism – the logic of “everyone for themselves” – leads us nowhere, except towards collective misery.

No, I don’t consider myself an activist. I don’t feel legitimate in calling myself that, and it would be disrespectful towards those who truly are activists. But my political reflections have always been my primary creative drive. That is how I find meaning in what I do. Making films is, for me, a way to take part in collective, political and human reflections, because cinema has the power to make the invisible visible: to show what’s not shown, or what we prefer not to see.