“Le Monde” spoke with the director of a video, massively shared on social networks, which gives to imagine Paris under the bombs and calls for more support for Ukraine.
by
A girl stands in front of the Eiffel Tower. She raised her arms as sometimes do the tourists, and on the images filmed with a smartphone, it looks like she holds the Eiffel Tower between her two hands. Suddenly, an explosion, cries and plumes of black smoke rise behind it. Another plane in the smartphone, in a typical Paris street: a fighter plane drops a bomb on a building. The video continues on other images of Paris in flames, on the background of sirens, tears of children and adults that panic. It ends on a message, in English – “Imagine if it had to arrive in another European capital” – and a supplication of the Ukrainian president, Volodyymyr Zelensky:
“Close the sky over Ukraine or give us more drivers. If we fall, you fall.”
The video appeared Friday night and flourished at high speed on social networks, particularly on the accounts of the Ukrainian government. Nothing but on the country’s Parliament, The video has been seen more than two million times
Le Monde has been able to talk to the director of this video. French, screenwriter, director and film producer living in Kiev, Olias Barco woke up Sunday morning to the sound of the Russian missiles who fell on the Ukrainian military base of Yavoriv. It’s been several days since he took out the country and children and joined the west of Ukraine. If he explains that he did not want to appear, at first, to better let the video talk about herself, he accepted, from the moment his name started to circulate, to answer a few questions.
“Give an electroshock to the West”
“It’s not an order from the Ukrainian government,” he wanted to clarify, explaining, with anger in the voice:
“It’s something I wanted to do myself, with producer Jean-Charles Lévy, to give an electroshock to the West. For me, we are in a third world war and this conflict goes To be generalized. It’s an anticipation film, not a propaganda film. “
The video was filmed in Paris and last week since Ukraine. Olias Barco was able to count on using a big French company specializing in special effects, which he does not want to name, nor who he worked. He wants to spare them the threats he has begun to receive on social networks. “We have not been paid, not funded,” he still specifies.
The video seizes guts by its cold realism. Of course, there are these familiar landscapes and these professional special effects. But if these images are realistic, it is that they look terribly like those who arrive every day from Ukraine, posted on social networks by simple citizens now living under the Russian bombs. The framing is random, the pictures tremble a little, we hear the fear of the one who holds the phone when the war suddenly arises on the screen.
“I wanted this realistic video, because I wanted it to touch the world. I did it in Paris because I am French, it’s my city”, says Olias Barco: