Grand Ciel
Drama • 2025 • 1h 32m
This movie was screened on 82. Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica 2025
Vincent works nights on a large construction site dedicated to building the futuristic district of Grand Ciel. When a colleague disappears without explanation, Vincent and the other workers begin to suspect that management is hiding something serious. Tension rises further with the disappearance of a second worker, and Vincent starts to notice unsettling phenomena within the site.
Reviewed by Beatrice
06. September 2025
"What madness, the love of work! What great theatrical skill capital has shown in making the exploited love exploitation, the noose loved by those to be hanged, and the chain loved by slaves..."
(F. Nietzsche)
(F. Nietzsche)
The glass of metropolises reflects not the light of dawn, but the weariness of the humanity that builds it. In Grand Ciel, this feeling is palpable: it is not a sky celebrating the horizon, but a ceiling of concrete and gray, a horizontal abyss into which one sinks.
Hata’s camera lingers on industrial spaces where progress takes the form of a silent monster, and the architecture itself seems to consume the workers as if they were raw material. In this dance of fatigue and fog, Vincent, exhausted yet clinging to his family, remains aware that the social machinery is stronger than those who operate it.
And it is precisely within this machinery that an invisible fracture occurs: solidarity among coworkers crumbles, corrupted by power structures that divide to rule. The bosses, and their representatives, orchestrate the isolation of the workers, sowing distrust and eroding the bonds that unite them, because an isolated body resists less than a cohesive community. The film portrays this as well: not only physical labor but also the slow disintegration of a collective.
The settings, imbued with nocturnal blues and diluted grays, evoke a world that has lost the promise of redemption. There, gestures become acts of survival, light is a faint echo, and the narrative refrains from indulgence: there are no slogans, only sighs; no revolts, only daily gestures carrying an urgency that the film suggests rather than proclaims.
Yet Grand Ciel does not settle into documentary realism, nor does it merely depict misery: it dances on the border between social realism, allegory, and even horror. A horror without visible monsters, built from unexplained disappearances, of workers vanishing as if absorbed by the industry itself. Their absence becomes a disturbing, realistic enigma, a void more unsettling than blood. Here, the work assumes its most radical dimension: these bodies leave no memory—they become dust. Dust as the ultimate existential residue, an extreme metaphor for those who work and consume themselves until disappearing.
Vincent is not a hero; he is a mirror, a disposable cog meant to construct other cogs. The film’s visual structure forces us to look inside the logic of industrial civilization, and the absence of an autonomous narrative voice becomes an invitation: to find our own, even if lost amid the noise of the factories.
Cinematography transforms the sky into a prison, and the most intimate moments are caught in the cold lights of a future that promises nothing. The actors, some non-professionals, do not act—they exist, they endure. In this context, class or social status differences level out in the burning air of night work, in the muted silence of industrial feedback.
Yet there is resilience in their eyes: a fidelity distant from the system, yet immanent. It is loyalty to family, to the dignity of the act itself, despite the consequences of precariousness, competition, and the fear of social downgrading that can erode solidarity among colleagues. The construction site thus becomes a metaphor for a society that thrives on the struggles of those who build it, while Vincent confronts his fears and the weight of individual responsibility in a dystopian and alienating context.
Grand Ciel is a visual and moral score, a silent poem that sings of modern toil as a social and existential act. The sky does not open to the masses—it pulverizes them.
"Human slavery has reached its peak in our time in the form of freely paid labor."
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
This movie was in the official competition of 82nd Venice International Film Festival 2025
