By Jordan Cronk on August 27, Located roughly 15 miles southwest of Nice, in the Valbonne valley of southern France, Sophia Antipolis is one of a growing number of semi-autonomous technology parks scattered around greater Europe.
For most, these hubs of biotechnology and computer research science are curiosities at best, and beacons of unchecked capitalism at worst. Structured in a roundabout fashion, the film follows three primary charactersβa Vietnamese woman who joins up with a local cult, a young man who falls in with a right-wing paramilitary outfit, and a young girl whose friend, Sophia, recently burned to death in a warehouse fireβand a handful of peripheral figures through a series of deceptively serene vignettes that build with a subtle cumulative poignancy.
As in his previous film, Mercuriales , a similarly surreal urban social study, Vernier exhibits a rare knack for evoking the ennui of modern life and the ghosts that haunt the margins of even the most unassuming environments. Shot on beautifully textured 16mm, Sophia Antipolis imaginatively depicts an ostensibly alien landscape with just enough real world detail to genuinely unsettle. Many people outside of France might not be familiar with Sophia Antipolis.
Can you give us a brief history of the development of this region, and where the idea originated to make a film there? So they created a lot of very American-style buildings, to expand tourism, and like Silicon Valley it would be a place that scientists could do research. My grandmother has a little hotel near Sophia Antipolis, and since my birth many of my vacations and holidays were spent there.
When I would leave the Nice airport I would see highway signs with the name Sophia Antipolis, but even then I knew nobody went there. So when I was a kid I would fantasize about this world, and I imagined it as an ancient Greek city, or perhaps a city of the future.
