Notre-Dame on Fire

On 15 April 2019 fire breaks out in Notre-Dame cathedral. The film recounts roughly twelve hours of that day step by step: the first alarm being misread, the fire crews stuck in traffic, the teams climbing the tower stairs, the lead melting and the decision taken to save the bell towers. Jean-Jacques Annaud directed. It opened on 16 March 2022. He designed it from the start as a hybrid, with five percent of it to be footage of the actual event. A year before release he made a public appeal, announcing that he needed material of the traffic the fire caused, of people praying spontaneously in the street and of some international television reports, and set up a website so anyone could send their own video. The finished film interleaves reconstruction, digital effects, amateur phone video, social media material and news footage; in one passage Macron himself appears to be talking to an actor playing the fire chief. The most concrete technical detail is the ceiling collapse. Seventy-five cubic metres of timber were suspended on a soundstage, built in balsa. To get the sound right, real old oak beams were dropped onto concrete by crane and recorded. Opinion divided. One side called it a film that records twelve hours in forensic detail and never lets go; the other attacked it for looking like a television docudrama. Who it is for: viewers who like disaster accounts and real-time rescue operations. Who it is not for: anyone looking for characters. The film describes people by their job and stays with nobody for long.