Alexandre Trannoy

Subject:

The film traces the "career" of Alexandre Trannoy, an "enigmatic" and "ghostly" French film maker, born in 1926, who worked for almost three decades in cinema, collaborating with stars such as Marlene Dietrich, Lino Ventura, Anouk Aimée, or Marcello Mastroianni, yet never completed one single movie, shaping a figure denoted as "the Don Quixote of cinema." Viewed retrospectively as a "noble dreamer," Trannoy's "elusive" figure was an obsession shared by the two directors since they were adolescent friends, hearing about him for the first time from veteran actor Jean Rochefort.

The film is unable to shed light on the post-cinema years of Trannoy, who, in the words of a reviewer, "disappear[ed] into the folds of film history," the world eventually learning only that he died in 1980 at the age of 54, in a plane crash, still scouting for film locations.

The documentary shows clips from film shot by Trannoy and contains numerous interviews with people who knew him, worked with him, or admired his work. Veteran French director Claude Lelouch relates the time he worked as assistant to Trannoy.