Alarms
2024 · 17m · FR
Directed by Nicolas Panay
Tones: contemplative, tense
Pierre, a French construction foreman overseeing an eco-district, must hold together an exhausted crew under crushing deadlines while ensuring safety is never sacrificed.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Panay turns a construction site safety inspection into Chernobyl-level dread — Coumans' performance is the kind of social realism that makes festival juries and working people equally gutted.
French construction-foreman drama with the rhythms of the job as formal grammar — that's a specific, unfashionable subject treated with respect. Stéphane Brizé territory done right could be a small marvel.
Brizé-adjacent procedural realism around French construction-site management — Panay treats the rhythms of overseeing safety-versus-deadline as the film's actual formal grammar, which is exactly the kind of attention that elevates this above 'social realism short.' The Bear is a slightly aspirational comparison but the impulse is correct.
Festivals
- Clermont-Ferrand 2024
- Tribeca 2024