TRIBUTES AND RETROSPECTIVES

Sport and cinema

Olga

Elie Grappe
2021 - Switzerland / France / Ukraine - 1h25

Screenings : sunday 21 - 1:45 pm - Grand Théâtre - followed by a debate with Anastasia Budiashkina - actress thursday 25 - 10:00 am - Centre de congrès - Auditorium - presented and followed by a debate with the film directors

2013. A 15-year-old gymnast is torn between Switzerland, where she is training for the European Championships with a view to the Olympics, and Kyiv, where her journalist mother is covering the Maidan Uprising.

In Kyiv, during the winter of 2014, the Ukrainian people chased from power their president, Viktor Yanukovych, who had just cancelled an association agreement with the European Union so as to get closer to Russia. Shoulder to shoulder in the Independence Square (Maidan), Ukrainians showed the world the destiny they aspired to. Olga explores this story through that of a young gymnast who discovers the revolutionary events taking place in her country from a distance. It was in 2015 while shooting a documentary short called Hors scène, about an orchestra in a music schools, that Elie Grappe met a Ukrainian violinist who had arrived in Switzerland just before Euromaidan: “I was deeply moved by the way she told me about the uprising and the way the images reached her. I found the connection between the various themes that interested me for my first film: filming the passion of a teenager, through the action of her body, and the juxtaposition of her individual challenge and the collective challenge.” “This beautiful portrait of a teenager owes a lot to Nastya Budiashkina, a real gymnast, who plays her.” (Caroline Vié; 20 minutes)

CAST AND CREW

Cast : Anastasiia Budiashkina, Sabrina Rubtsova, Caterina Barloggio, Théa Brogli, Jérôme Martin
Screenplay : Raphaëlle Desplechin, Elie Grappe
Cinematography : Lucie Baudinaud
Editing : Suzana Pedro
Music : Pierre Desprats

Production : Point Prod, Cinémadefacto, Point Prod, Agence Nationale de Gestion des Oeuvres Audiovisuelles (ANGOA), Canal+

French distributor : ARP