TRIBUTES AND RETROSPECTIVES

Sport and cinema

The Program

Stephen Frears
2015 - United Kingdom / United States / France - 1h39

Screenings : monday 22 - 2:30 pm - Pathé - 2 - presented by Sébastien Farouelle - film teacher saturday 27 - 7:30 pm - Pathé - 1

Irish sports journalist David Walsh has been interested in cyclist Lance Armstrong since his beginnings. Although he liked Armstrong, he was not convinced that he had the ability to become a champion. Walsh observed his career and followed his supernatural rise. Gradually evidence comes out suggesting that Armstrong, under the wing of Dr Ferrari, owes his incredible success to illicit substances…

After recovering from cancer, Lance Armstrong won seven Tours de France. This positive and inspiring story of resilience hides the raw reality evoked in Stephen Frears' film: the doping of the teams at the time, and also the marketing and communication practices that went on. The challenge was to remove the real to benefit the construction of a fiction for all. “The Program is first and foremost the portrait of the troubled man that is Lance Armstrong, a cunning mythomaniac whose arrangements with the truth are strangely similar to the worst traits of our time (the headlong race for celebrity, the supremacy of money, which corrupts and subjugates…). (…) Ben Foster manages to make us feel the faults of this complex person, bogged down in his own lies, who is both a supreme manipulator and a puppet in a game that despite everything has overtaken him.” (Nicolas Journet; Critikat)

CAST AND CREW

Cast : Ben Foster, Chris O'Dowd, Guillaume Canet, Jesse Plemons, Lee Pace, Denis Ménochet, Edward Hogg, Dustin Hoffman
Screenplay : John Hodge
Cinematography : Danny Cohen
Editing : Valerio Bonelli
Music : Alex Heffes

Production : Anton, Momentum Pictures, StudioCanal, Working Title Films

French distributor : Tamasa Distribution