Synopsis
The Great Arch (L'Inconnu de la Grande Arche, 2025) is a historical drama by director Stéphane Demoustier you can watch online on iFILM. Claes Bang plays Johan Otto von Spreckelsen, a Danish architecture teacher from Copenhagen who, in 1983, entered an open competition launched by President Mitterrand and beat the world's top firms — despite having built only four structures in his entire career: his own home and three small chapels.
The competition was meant to crown a new French landmark. No one expected the underdog to win. The film tracks Spreckelsen across years of construction: bureaucratic standoffs, mounting self-doubt, clashes with the French project team. Xavier Dolan, Sidse Babett Knudsen and Swann Arlaud round out the cast as the concrete and glass of La Défense slowly rise around him. It's a portrait of a quiet man holding his ground against institutions built to wear people like him down.
A Danish-French co-production drawn from documented accounts of one of the twentieth century's most unlikely architectural triumphs. Watch The Great Arch (2025) online on iFILM.
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