At 19, Aurélien and Léa will shoot their own film in Abbeville

Aurélien Debergh et Léa Assouswho were still at the Saint-Pierre d’ high schoolAbbeville only a year ago, gathered a team and made a medium-length film set in their hometown.

Cinema option in high school

It all started at Saint-Pierre High School when the two high school students signed up for the cinema option in second grade. They then discovered cinema with a few other students, which marked the beginning of a common passion and a solid friendship.

In second grade, the young film buffs were only supposed to tackle theoretical notions and not practical ones, but the group of students already wanted to go further and make their own film, so they insisted and embarked on the first project of a long series.

A short film during Covid

In the midst of Covidthey were forced to reconcile confinement, distance learning and filming, and dedicated a large part of their free time to see this short film through to the end, with their burgeoning passion for cinema as their sole driving force.

» Being together and creating made us love movie theater. We are a group of friends who have transformed into a team” explains Léa, assistant director of their upcoming film.

The following year, they redoubled their investment and produced several reports and a new short fiction film, becoming increasingly seasoned filmmakers.

“That’s the moment when we started to make more elaborate shots, we had a real intention behind the film” recalls Aurélien, the director. In final year, the young team moved to the next level by working with professionals: external actors, technical speakers, etc.

At the end of high school, everything suggested that their paths were going to separate, with higher studies looming: Aurélien left for an audiovisual BTS with an engineering option in Roubaix, while Léa began studying law in Paris.

Aurélien, however, quickly embarked on a new project which would once again bring them together.

A desire to do something in your hometown

In October 2023, while he was reunited with his family on vacation, Aurélien felt a desire to do something in his hometown of Abbeville, while putting his passion for cinema to good use. He then took his notebook and began to create a character: his name, his appearance, his studies, his family history…

He then got back in touch with Léa, his long-time film partner, to tell her about this unexpected project. Despite her demanding studies, she also felt a lack and nostalgia for their previous filming, and without hesitation joined forces with Aurélien.

They then began to write the story of this character together, imagining the scenes and settings in the streets of Abbeville, choosing the themes addressed in the film, until developing a complete scenario giving birth to their film: Phantasma .

Once this work was completed and they had a sixty-page script in their hands, they realized the scale of their project compared to the high school short films, whose script was barely ten pages long.

“We had to reconcile all that with studies, but it was great to find ourselves in this separate world for a few hours a week,” smiles Léa.

A story inspired by one of their friends

Phantasma was going to tell the story of Sébastien, a young student, who returns to his hometown and meets a girl. The latter invites him to consume LSD to regain his lost memories of his mother’s suicide, which prevent him from moving forward in life.

Behind their medium-length film, the two young filmmakers actually embark on a real personal quest, which was inspired by one of their friends.

A team of around 40 people

The project then quickly came to fruition when they began to bring together a team, in particular by leveraging their network: students from Aurélien’s BTS, friends who were part of the cinema option at high school, word of mouth… they thus quickly formed a team of around forty people.

With an average age not expected to exceed twenty, around forty young volunteers joined the project, with the sole motivation of their common love for cinema.

Then came the financing of the project, an often difficult step in the audiovisual world. We had to raise funds, negotiate, plan all the expenses, find the equipment…

“It’s a lot of stress and responsibility for everyone involved. It’s an enormous scale compared to high school, we no longer come just to film with equipment waiting for us, there are logistics, organization, security…” explain Léa and Aurélien.

All the scenes filmed in Abbeville

After many months of pre-production, the Phantasma team will take advantage of the summer to shoot all the scenes in Abbeville.

To do this, they organized everything with the town hall in order to benefit from the places that are most dear to them. They will notably be at the Saint Pierre bar, on the banks of the Somme, and even at the municipal swimming pool to shoot underwater sequences.

From July 8 to 25, they will finally be able to bring this ambitious project to fruition with a team of professional actors.

Search for extras

“We often think about the finished product shown in the cinema, but it is above all the experience of filming that we wait for,” Léa gets impatient.

It is at this moment that Aurélien will be able to fully embody his role as director by working on the direction, the acting, the dialogues, or even the bodily expression, while Léa is the real conductor behind the meticulous planning of the filming and all the legal and administrative procedures.

Once this long-awaited shooting is finished, the film will move on to the post-production stage with a team dedicated to it: making an original soundtrack, sound effects, dubbing… a tedious job still awaits the young directors.

Release scheduled for spring 2025

The release of Phantasma is then scheduled for April or May 2025, with a preview in Abbeville and Lille.

The team is still looking for volunteer extras aged 18 to 22 for Thursday July 11 (contact by email: [email protected]).

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