His traumas, his therapy, his need to give hope… Frédéric Lopez's confidences

Far from the souvenir barn and the bucolic garden of the house near Fontainebleau where the film was filmed “A Sunday in the countryside”it is in a Parisian café on the outskirts of the Butte-aux-Cailles district that Frédéric Lopez arranged to meet us on a cloudy Monday in October. The host – having arrived straight from a preparation session for a shoot for which he leaves with his team the next day – walks through the door of the bar, accompanied by Piccolina, his faithful border collie.

Entitled “The Unexpected Parenthesis”, at its launch in 2012, and until 2014, the program is reborn in October 2022 under the name “A Sunday in the Country”. The principle? Invite three guests, from different backgrounds, for a stay far from the hustle and bustle of the city. Two days of recording compressed into 1 hour 45 minutes of “resilient” broadcast, as Frédéric Lopez likes to call it. Between filming and broadcast, a minimum of four months pass to allow…