Heysel 85 Panorama
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About
It was supposed to be the crowning moment of the 1985 football season: the European Cup Final between English champions Liverpool and Italy’s Juventus, hosted in Belgium’s Heysel Stadium. But a day that began with huge anticipation and excitement spiralled out of control when rival fans confronted each other before a ball had even been kicked, leading to one of the darkest hours in the history of professional sports
Belgian-Romanian filmmaker Teodora Ana Mihal dramatizes a tragic story of violence, hubris, and incompetence that centers on two fictional characters: Luca (Matteo Simoni), a young Italian football journalist with family in the stands; and Marie (Violet Braeckman), press attaché to her father, the mayor of Brussels (Josse De Pauw). Leaning into the nervy docu-disaster movie mode, Mihal ingeniously meshes news footage of the escalating crisis with recreations of the cynical politicking going on, unseen, in the backrooms of the stadium. This is an intense, harrowing drama that resonates with our own troubled times.
Belgian-Romanian filmmaker Teodora Ana Mihal dramatizes a tragic story of violence, hubris, and incompetence that centers on two fictional characters: Luca (Matteo Simoni), a young Italian football journalist with family in the stands; and Marie (Violet Braeckman), press attaché to her father, the mayor of Brussels (Josse De Pauw). Leaning into the nervy docu-disaster movie mode, Mihal ingeniously meshes news footage of the escalating crisis with recreations of the cynical politicking going on, unseen, in the backrooms of the stadium. This is an intense, harrowing drama that resonates with our own troubled times.
