Romain Gavras and his team set up a camera in a town in the Paris region. A place that was not chosen by chance.
That’s right, Athena is finally available on Netflix. Romain Gavras’ film immerses us in the midst of a family tragedy that boils youth and turns into complete chaos. The city is barricaded and its inhabitants are ready to take up arms.
To shoot this feature film, the director and his team set up the camera in the summer of 2021 in Evry-Courcouron park, a suburb of Paris, where the rapper Koba La D is from, among others.
Apparently for production designer Arno Roth: “When we arrived, it was a moment of grace. It was probably the only one with its geography and structure that told us about a fortified castle. This tile, this agora is six meters off the ground, there’s a 2×2 lane going down, we already had topography that matched pretty well what we were looking for. The architecture seduced us, half the city was empty… the further we went, the clearer it became..”
Since some of the residential buildings are uninhabited – the district is undergoing rehabilitation of new buildings – the teams changed the typography of the city somewhat. The slab is closed and the walls are raised to create an enclosed feeling.
Everything was thought out to the smallest detail: “When we arrived, there was a lot of street art graffiti on the slab and we were not satisfied. It was too “like”. In order not to erase these works, which tell us part of the rich history of this city, it was impossible to make these graffiti disappear. 90% of them were covered, processed and discovered when we left. The few we had to paint, we arranged with the artists who did them, and allowed them to do new ones after our departure. We worked with old-style taggers of my generation (40-50 years old) who knew how to do all styles and were able to do permanent graffiti like Pompeii, Rome, political graffiti and reactions.“.
Local residents also took part in the film – mostly in excess. Even if some objected to the noise of the mortars and the scenes of violence that took place at night, Athena immortalized the scene of the disappearance.
Source: allocine
Emily Jhon is a product and service reviewer at Gossipify, known for her honest evaluations and thorough analysis. With a background in marketing and consumer research, she offers valuable insights to readers. She has been writing for Gossipify for several years and has a degree in Marketing and Consumer Research from the University of Oxford.
