Lights! Camera! Eurovision! Or should we say Eurovisions? That’s the name of a new French-language documentary from ARTE — the Franco-German broadcaster known for producing quality content on European culture.
Last spring filmmaker Claire Laborey waded into the Eurovision Song Contest in Stockholm, hanging out in the press centre and throwing herself into the fandom on the streets.
Her behind-the-scenes film looks at political fissures that divide us, the musical bonds that unite us and how those tensions played out in one of the most hotly-contested editions in years.
“Beyond the surge of kitsch and rhinestones, Eurovision is a surprising mirror of our Europe in all its tension and uncertainties,” the program description says.
“Looking back on the hustle and bustle of the 2016 edition, the competition takes on an air of the cold war, with a rivalry for the top between Ukrainian singer Jamala and Russia’s Sergey Lazarev.
The French-language documentary will air on ARTE on Friday, May 12 at 22.25 CET. An English-language version is also in the works.
The team from wiwibloggs was lucky enough to spend time with Claire during her stay in Eurovision-land, and we can attest that she approached her mission with great care and sensitivity.
We grew quite accustomed to having her stop by our table in the press centre to get candid responses as we assessed odds, conducted interviews, dissected rehearsals and generally threw ourselves into the event. We’re thrilled to see that we’ve got some cameos in the final cut!
Apologies in advance for the heavy bags under our eyes. Covering Eurovision round-the-clock is exhausting!
This is amazing! Looking forward! It will be very interesting!
And we’ll have the chance to see you guys slaying!
Good for you, maybe I’ll tune in and see if my French is good enough, lol.
How awesome is this?! I´m so happy for all of the Wiwi Team! 🙂 arte shows high quality documentaries about music, politics, society, often with a french focus, but as far as I know only aired in french and german language. I hope they will have some more specials about Eurovision in May. I find it a great support for the ESC community, epecially because most of other media don`t really care about the music, but arte takes it quite seriously. Greetings from Germany!
You from Wiwibloggs.com are always on TV, in NFs or documentaries about ESC. I do not understand why. Do I have to have a special job or so? I heard William studied Psychology. How can one work at Eurovision like you? I want that too, but do not know how to get behind Eurovision like your team. Your website should give us normal readers some advice.
wiwibloggs is always at eurovision events because they are a blog that works with everything eurovision, and get accreditations for press to the events.
So, basically, being a journalist/blogger/reporter is a way to be inside eurovision 🙂
Yeah. If you google William you’ll see he writes for Billboard, the New York Times and lots of magazines so he is a journalist and Eurofan. I guess it helps him and the web site.
Pretty sure he went to Harvard as well so even though he’s fun he has a brain and can talk well.
I laugh so much with the clip. Zoë aww dans un pays loin d’ici à la recherche du paradis now it’s in my head ! We gave you 22/24 points :3 Hope she can work in France. It seems it was done with a décalé approach it’ll be entertaining !
That looks amazing, well done Arte for not falling for some clichés and well done team Wiwi! 🙂
I hope there will be an English-subbed version! Or I’m just gonna have to learn French quickly… 😛
It looks well-made, and hopefully takes on these subjects from as objective a view as possible. 🙂
Technical issue: The video doesn’t load on my phone. There’s just a large black window there. 🙁
Issue sorted. I used the “programme description” link to open it in a browser. It was the Wiwi app that was blocking the video for some reason.
i’m deceased @ french william
Omg thise moves are amazing! Pitty I didn’t see them before. Also hillarious how they dubbed William