An environmental activist has a plan against an international oil firm

Before glamouring us with his dark humour film ‘Deux Dollars‘, French Canadian filmmakers Emmanuel Tenenbaum stormed the internet with his first rugged dark comedy ‘Sans Plomb’. We take a look back at this environmentalist high jacking gone wrong as it is a film that marked us strongly, with fear, laughs and despair, with a theme that still holds up firmly even five years later. The film’s high intensity pace is driven by the main character’s instability, heightened by the edgy and intentionally nervous camera movements. The film runs through seamlessly in one shot which highlights the minute by minute development and unfolding of the story – but in a twisting fashion Emmanuel reveals that the short was actually several different shots stitched together.

‘Sans Plomb’ was shot during a Kinomada event. Kinomada is an organization from Quebec that invites filmmakers from all over the world to write, produce and edit a shortfilm over a period of 10 days. The 100 people attending made 60 films during the event ! It was also where I met scriptwriter Guillaume Fournier: Sans Plomb was our first collaboration. Because everybody was shooting his film at the same time, we had only 4h with the demanded actors, and so that’s what we did. The film consists of 7 shots stitched together, people tend to notice a maximum of 1 though !

Read more on how Emmanuel managed to stitch seven different shots into one long take.