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France, Luxembourg / 2025 / 92min
Director：HATA Akihiro

Vincent works the night shifts on the large-scale futuristic development site ‘Grand Ciel’. When a worker goes missing, Vincent and his colleagues suspect that their superiors are covering up an accident. As another worker goes missing, the workers unite to solve the mystery.

Set at a giant futuristic development site, the film outlines the reality of the harsh working conditions of construction workers in France with a stark, unflinching gaze. Vincent devoutly works the night shifts to provide a better life for his family. Suspicion grows on the site when the superiors take no action over the mysterious disappearances of immigrant workers. Eventually, Vincent is markedly set apart from his colleagues when he is offered a promotion. As the workers’ worry and suspicion rise, elements of genre cinema gradually intervene in this otherwise realist film. Terror inhabits the dim basement dug by the workers, and the megastructure transforms into a dystopian space. While the urban development continues, the workers’ spirit and morality silently corrupts. Using horror genre elements, the contrast of the progressing city and corruption of the workers who formed the foundation of the project is sure to leave a lasting impression to the audience. The film made its premiere at the Venice Film Festival’s Orizzonti program.

Director’s statement

How can job precarity and societal pressure insidiously warp a person’s body and mind, to the point of destroying all sense of solidarity, trust and comradeship? This question is at the heart of Grand Ciel. Through Vincent – a temp construction worker, terrified of social downgrading – the film explores how self-interest slowly supplants the common good. Gradually, the shift starts to contaminate even Vincent’s home life. Relationships fray, worn down by his fear of failure. Vincent lives under a constant, genuine, almost palpable threat: in a ruthless economic system, in a silent war, each worker must fight to protect their patch. And there’s the more silent threat, like an echo in the bowels of the construction site: a concrete labyrinth where neon lights hollow out cadaverous faces, where silence constricts the throat and asphyxiates the mind. That omnipresent concrete, cold and mineral, whose floating dust, like a relentless toxic fog, seeps into every crack, threatening to engulf you, while the giant construction site keeps growing and growing at all costs.