A soul-stirring story about a boxer and a whale trainer, whose worlds collide in an accident that confines the attractive athlete to a wheelchair.
Ali belongs to the margins of society: friendless, penniless and homeless. All he has in this world is his five-year-old son. They take refuge with Ali’s sister in Antibes, the French Riviera. Ali first runs into Stephanie, a killer whale trainer, during a night club brawl. When Ali sees her next, she is confined to a wheel chair: through the unpredictability of the whales she has lost her legs and quite a few illusions. Though the task is challenging, he simply helps her, with no compassion or pity. There are quite a few obstacles, serious as well as unexpected, that they have to overcome in order to start a new life together.
»We wanted the power of stark, brutal and contrasting images in order to further the melodrama: the aesthetics of the Great Depression, of county-fair films whose bizarre visual work sublimates the dark reality of a world in which God 'vomits the lukewarm'.« (Jacques Audiard)
Jacques Audiard
The son of screenplay-writer and director Michel Audiard, Jacques Audiard was born in 1952 in Paris into a family of filmmakers. He started out in the film industry on the editing of Bons baisers à lundi (1974) directed by his father, and then began his career as a screenplay-writer. He made his directorial debut in 1994. He received the Cannes Grand Jury Prize, two BAFTA Awards as well as 17 Cesar Awards for A Prophet and The Beat That My Heart Skipped.