What is the 733 project with the movie Color of Victory?

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Citation du film La couleur de la victoire

OUR PROJECT

The values promoted through Jesse Owens' account of his achievement are still relevant, and even more so than ever in a society where inequalities, racism and intolerance are far from gone.

The goal of the association is to make this part of the athlete's life known, especially to the younger generations, through the film "Race". With the agreement and support of Luc Dayan, co-producer of the film, as well as the Jesse Owens Foundation, the association is working to broadcast the film in schools. An educational content has been developed at the Académie de Créteil, by a team of volunteer teachers, in order to generate debate after each screening.

If the film is about a complex period in history, it is by no means a political film. It presents factually a part of the athlete's life in a historical context well known to all, while leaving the viewers to take a critical look at what happened to him, and where our society is more than 80 years later. The ideal opportunity to encourage young generations to reflect on subjects linked to strong values: tolerance, respect, surpassing oneself, fraternity...

The experiment initiated by Val-de-Marne in the colleges of the Académie de Créteil, aims to extend throughout France - 63,000 public and 12,300 private institutions - with the help of the French National Olympic and Sports Committee and the regions of France and their departments.

Using the positive experience in France, we hope that other francophone countries, particularly on the African continent and in Canada, will deploy the project. The film is available in several languages, so the project could even extend well beyond French-speaking countries.

THE MOVIE

The idea of making a film about Jesse Owens' exceptional adventure was born in 1991, when Luc Dayan discovered incidentally the story of this athlete. He was then filming with an ultra-slow motion camera for Canal+ the great Carl Lewis during the athletics meeting in Villeneuve d'Ascq. The media compared him and Jesse Owens to their 4 Olympic gold medals in the same disciplines (100m/200m/Length and 4x100m).

What immediately interested Luc Dayan was to understand how an African American had found himself in Berlin in 1936, and what had went wrong in the Nazi propaganda to make it possible. Luc found it in a book he got at the time. He read the little story in the shadow of the big one and promised to make a film of it one day...

Then, in 1996, at the occasion of Atlanta’s OG (60 years after Berlin’s OG), Luc produced “Tribute to Jesse Owens and Carl Lewis” a 60 seconds short film awarded several times.

Several years later, in 2011, he decided to finally get down to work on this feature film project, for which he immediately found the title, "RACE". Thanks to Jean-Charles Lévy and Nicolas Manuel, whose job it is to produce independent films in English, and the financial support of many friends who are passionate about sports, Luc managed to complete the film's budget (26 Million Euros), as part of a German-Canadian co-production.

It is important to specify that this film does not trace the life of Jesse Owens. It begans when Owens returned to Ohio University and met coach Larry Snyder (who prepared him for the 1936 Berlin Olympics) and ends shortly after the Berlin Olympics. The facts described are all consistent with historical truth. Jesse Owens' family was involved in the production from the very beginning.

It is a film about Sport in which Jesse Owens is certainly the hero, but which speaks about efforts, friendship, luck, compromises, racism, manipulations, even corruptions, themes which are always topical nowadays.

Download the press kit Download the educational notebook

Movie trailer