Building Bastille (Straight from screenings at the ADFF in the U.S.)

Building Bastille film Trailer HERE

In 1982 the new French president Mitterrand opens a blind competition, to build a new  opera house  at the site of the notorious Bastille prison The jury seems to have found the best design, by prominent American architect Richard Meier. Or so they thought.

Until the Minister of Culture at the announcemment blanches and stumbles through the name Carlos Ott, Canadian. No one has heard of him and he has never built anything. They chose the wrong guy? Hastily informed, Carlos flies to Paris with an expired passport and is tossed into an airport holding cell for immediate deportment.

Official panic ensues. Things get worse from there.

But like French politics, nothing is what it appears. A year later when Jacques Chirac is elected Prime Minister, he hates Mitterrand and works to stop the Opera When Carlos Ott receives Chirac's stop work order, the money is cut off. It seems that all the sacrifice is for naught. He makes it happen anyway. 

Building Bastille is a feature length documentary that tells the comic, dramatic and tangled story of modern history's greatest case of mistaken identity and seized opportunity. 

Fun fact: While shooting the documentary, the production team's hotel was firebombed by Les Giletes Jeaunes. Just to add fuel to the fire.