As countless locals fled the French capital in the lead-up to last year’s Olympic games, actor and filmmaker Valentine Cadic hunkered down, putting her hands on a camera, assembling a small crew and then running headlong into the rush to shoot “That Summer in Paris.” Film screens Feb. 15 in the Berlin Film Festival’s Perspectives section.
Building on her background in documentary — and taking inspiration from Justine Triet’s debut, “Age of Panic,” which worked in a similar vein — Cadic wrung fiction from fact, using the crowds and fan-zones as high-production value backdrops for a more intimate drama about a lovesick young woman looking to reconnect with her estranged kin.
“I like to mix make believe with real life,” Cadic says. “[Creatively], I started to question what this event could bring to the lives of everyone involved — be it the athletes, the spectators or the city itself. [And pragmatically] such events push you to action. When preparing a low-budget feature, you can always find a reason to delay production, while the financing process can take so long that you sometimes lose sight of why you ever wanted to make a film — so having a fixed date and framework kept us motivated and energetic.”
Cadic and her crew fully embraced the games, preparing multiple versions of scenes that played off the inherent unpredictability of live sports, as the team flocked to official areas, hiding in plain sight among the myriad other camera crews. When one background player was mistaken for an Olympics employee by a group of attendees, the extra played along, improving information on the fly to a flock of tourists none the wiser.
“That’s when we knew our costumes were authentic,” laughs Cadic.
The filmmaker even roped an Olympian into the cast, having French swimmer Beryl Gastaldello shoot footage from inside the athlete’s village while turning the swimmer’s 100 meter freestyle race into an integral plot point. The crew found themselves facing an even more surreal situation when they went back to shoot pick-ups.
“We had Beryl swimming and waving to the crowd, even though there were only about 10 of us in the stands along an empty pool where she was swimming alone,” says Cadic. “To add some atmosphere, we shouted along with the team to encourage her.”
As the title would suggest, “That Summer in Paris” is less a postcard from the games than a snapshot of the City of Light at a very particular moment in time — and here too did the unique circumstance enable this gung-ho production.
“Paris was a very strange place throughout the Olympics,” the filmmaker recalls. “Many people took off, leaving some areas full of excitement and energy with other, wider swaths of the city all of sudden empty and dead quiet. This strange and still parenthesis was a gift, allowing us to observe what’s around while keeping open to what might happen.”
And the filmmaker fully intends to seize on such opportunities going forward.
“I love to work with constraints, as in documentaries, where you have to constantly adapt to the setting and to the unexpected,” says Cadic. “I’m wary of meticulous planning, because the best moments come from surprises. But you need a team that’s ready to follow and that can integrate elements that aren’t pure fiction.”
