‘Athena’ Trailer: Paris Is Seething In Romain Gavras’ Netflix Drama; Director Talks Immersive Modern Tragedy – Venice
deadline.comEXCLUSIVE: Romain Gavras’ Athena will have its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on September 2, and we’ve got a first-look at the trailer for the immersive modern tragedy from Netflix — check it out above.
Following Athena’s Lido bow, it will be released globally on Netflix September 23.Athena is the third feature from Gavras, here teaming with previous collaborator Elias Belkeddar and longtime friend Ladj Ly (Les Misérables) on writing duties.
Ly and Gavras are also producers.The story begins just after the death of a young boy, in unexplained circumstances, throwing his three brothers and the whole of the eponymous Athena housing project outside Paris into chaos.
Gavras recently told Deadline the film was “imagined as a Greek tragedy, and ultimately the tragedy is a kind of inexorable advance towards chaos.” The filmmaker said the script was born “with a simple idea of being inside a spark that could set the nation ablaze in real time.”The film includes several extended, complex single-shot takes, and Gavras explained that cast and crew rehearsed for eight weeks before filming across 52 days outside the French capital — and without CGI. “The fights are real, the pyrotechnics are real,” he told me, adding, “It’s always difficult to create an impression of chaos and hysteria and violence,” but there was “an almost military organization” to the process.
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