OFFICIAL SELECTION - 2025 CANNES INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL (Un Certain Regard)
A captivating Claes Bang leads a superb ensemble cast in writer/director Stéphane Demoustier’s darkly comic new film, as an idealistic Danish architect whose quest to build an ambitious landmark in Paris in the early 1980s is threatened by political games, bureaucracy and the limits of artistic freedom.
1982. President François Mitterrand (Michel Fau) has launched an international competition to design the flagship project of his term in office: the Great Arch of La Défense, a building to match and complement the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe. To the surprise of everyone, the commission is won by an unknown 53-year-old from Copenhagen, Otto von Spreckelsen (Bang). An outsider with only a few modernist churches to his name, Spreckelsen’s stunning submission – taking the form of a perfect white cube – becomes the talk of the capital.
Spreckelsen and his wife Liv (Sidse Babett Knudsen) arrive in Paris to commence, overseen by the project’s shrewd managing bureaucrat (a memorable Xavier Dolan), but the purity of Spreckelsen’s envisioned design is soon tested not only by material and budgetary constraints but the vicissitudes of politics, forcing him to consider whether his desire for perfection is worth risking everything…
Inspired by remarkable true events, THE GREAT ARCH depicts a near-mythic story of both grand and lost illusions; a reminder that architecture, like cinema, is not just about one person's vision, but also collective perception.