Documentary

For their debut film, directors Antoine Prum and Boris Kremer stuck to the heels of Luxembourg strongman Georges Christen bending, towing and twisting his way through Russia. Proud holder of 23 Guinness Book World Records in feats of strength – such as bending nails, towing trains, planes, and ships with his teeth, or tearing up the yellow pages – this modern-day gladiator has been touring his unique PowerShow for more than twenty years. Muscles, sweat, and blood make his performing routine a unique mixture of genuine power and vintage-style entertainment, appreciated by audiences the world over. Looking back on an impressive track record, Christen felt the time had come for the ultimate challenge… Russia, the country of a strongman’s childhood idols, provides the backdrop to this unconventional film, a road movie that is at once melancholic and jubilatory. In a succession of tableaux vivants, TOUR DE FORCE draws an intimate picture of Russia today, caught between the burden of history and the repercussions of fast-paced Westernisation. A parade of truer-than-life characters and faces completes this modern-times ballad of the itinerant artist, where reality at times appears to outdo fiction.

Today’s manual laborers are no longer celebrated with hymns of praise. They must be content with encouraging one another that backbreaking work is better than no work at all… In the Ukraine, a group of men spend long days crawling through cramped shafts of illegal coal mines. Sulfur gatherers in Indonesia brave the smoky heat of an active volcano and the treacherous trip back down. Blood, fire and stench are routine for workers at a crowded open-air slaughterhouse in Nigeria. Pakistani men use little more than their bare hands to dismantle an abandoned oil tanker for scrap metal. Steelworkers in China fear they could be a dying breed… Five portraits of heavy manual labor, increasingly less visible in our technological 21st Century.

Earth is beautiful. It’s people who make it horrific. Bombay, Mexico City, Moscow, New York: seductive yet repellent monsters. The contradiction insinuates itself into the daily lives of those who populate these megacities. The film’s twelve chapters tell the tales of: Shankar, the Bioscope Man; Modesto, the chicken feet vendor; Baba Khan, the paint recycler; Nestor, the trash scavenger; Oleg, Borya, Kolya and Misha, the street kids; Cassandra, the performer; Larissa, the crane driver; Toni, the hustler. Day in, day out they all set about their struggle for survival with ingenuity, intelligence and dignity. And they all share a single fantasy: the dream of a better life. MEGACITIES is a film about work, poverty, violence, love and sex. A film about the beauty of people.