ULTRAPOLICE

Short Talk with Thibault Fauconnet (director) and Valentin Guyard (cinematographer)

BEST SHORT FICTION FILM Category

22nd IN THE PALACE International Short Film Festival 2025

France, Fiction, 00:05:30, 2024

Synopsis: On a crime scene, a forensic’s man find out that one of his colleague erase an evidence. Caught red handed, he chase his colleague who’s running away.

Biography: Assistant director since 4 years on a dozen projects for cinema and television. He directs, produces, writes and edits videos from an early age, and since several years he develops short films in parallel with his assistant career on fictional project.

Thibault Fauconnet, director

Raya Hristova: The events unfold on a crime scene. How did you prepare for all of this, the blood stains, costumes, and making everything look real?

Thibault Fauconnet: First, to create the right atmosphere, we searched for a set that was really creepy, something dark, where we could control the lighting. We found an artistic squat that worked perfectly. After that, it was mostly about finding police equipment.

Raya Hristova: Where did you find it? Through a costume shop?

Thibault Fauconnet: We rented it from a costume and accessories company. For the wardrobe, interestingly, we worked with a construction company, it was originally made for a painter.

Raya Hristova: And where exactly was the location we see in the film?

Thibault Fauconnet: Near Paris, in that same artistic squat.

Raya Hristova: The story takes an unusual turn. You could say it’s almost accidental. Can you expand on the case and what you hope the audience might take from it?

Thibault Fauconnet: I’m not sure if there’s a single lesson, but what I wanted to communicate was my vision of society, a society where crime and violence are trapped in a loop, where we don’t learn from the past. That’s the idea behind the plot.

Raya Hristova: How did you choose the title?

Thibault Fauconnet: That’s a good question. I don’t have a fixed answer, but my vision of society is something intense, ultra. Since the film involves the police, Ultrapolice just felt right.

Raya Hristova: Valentin, was this your first time working together?

Valentin Guyard: Yes, we had worked on a small commercial before. We got along well, no disagreements. It was a quite hard to produce the film. It was a very cheap film. The challenge was to create atmosphere with almost no budget and just one light. That was difficult, but we shared the same goal: to make it as cinematic and believable as possible. That goal shaped our collaboration.

Raya Hristova: How long did the shoot take?

Valentin Guyard: Two days.

Interviewer: Raya Hristova

Editor: Martin Kudlac