Premiers Plans Festival in Angers 2024 explores the links between sport and cinema

For its 36th edition, which will take place from January 20 to 28, 2024, the Premiers Plans Festival in Angers has chosen, in this Olympic year, to talk about the links that unite sport and cinema.

Besides history (the first Olympic Games of the modern era took place in 1896, only a few months after the invention of cinema), cinema and sport share many points in common:

• how does the art of movement stage and film bodies?
• cinema imagines heroes, sport provides many real examples,
• suspense: a film, like a sporting event, keeps the spectator in suspense,
• popularity: cinema is a popular art, sporting events create real popular enthusiasm,
• the collective emotion provoked by the cinema as well as by sport,
• the very present social and societal context: sport is a means of social elevation, it allows you to find and make a place for yourself in society,
• without forgetting the possible drifts or abuses generated by the sport. The Festival will offer the public around twenty films (short and feature films, fiction, documentaries, animation) showing different facets of sport in various iconic disciplines (boxing, running, cycling, football, horse riding, basketball, ice hockey, gymnastics, etc.) , with particular attention to young audiences.

Films already selected in this selection:
The Solitude of Long Distance Tony Richardson United Kingdom 1962 105′
Breaking Away Peter Yates USA 1979 101′
Raging Bull Martin Scorsese USA 1980 129′
Shaolin Soccer Stephen Chow Hong-Kong 2001 113’
The Summit of the Gods Patrick Imbert Luxembourg, France 2021 90′
Olga Elie Grappe France, Switzerland, Ukraine 2021 97′