New York City’s Millennium Film Workshop, located in Bushwick, is hosting its second short film screening of antifascist short films. Here, co-curators Leander and CJ share their short manifesto on the power of film to dream up antifascist futures. 

17 Dec 2025

Molly Lipson

JULIEN SOULIER - dir. Jimmy Fallon live performance & L’enfer music video

The Jimmy Fallon slot was during Covid so it had to be pre-recorded but still a live performance. I decided I wanted to do everything in one take, so then the challenge was to find a studio that could accommodate a 360 degree shoot because Marion wanted to have the dancers all around Paul. My shots therefore needed to follow the dancers but still focused on Stromae. I knew if we did too many shots it would end up looking more like a music video and not a live performance so my main goal was to make sure the first two takes were great. Luckily Paul gave an amazing performance, so my first experience of working with him was really good overall. 

I then co-created his music video for L’enfer. Paul had received so many pitches for this one with different creative visions, but for a song that was so personal to him and he didn’t feel like they really represented it well. He said to me, this will be a difficult project because we don’t know exactly what we want with it, although we do know what we expect at the end. I said, you know what, let’s go for the ride! 

We spent about three weeks working on the concept and in all honesty, everything I came up with at the start wasn’t working. The most difficult thing is trying to create something simple and powerful – as creatives we tend to go a bit over the top. Paul then sent me an image of something small in a big space, and I thought, okay, maybe we can just focus on what’s happening inside his head. We put Paul at the centre and nothing around him. We just needed a simple space with a precise colour, start shooting close up of his eyes and then zoom out to reveal all the different ways he felt during this hard time in his life. 

We knew we didn’t want to do something overtly sad, we needed to give it energy because the song itself is so powerful. We wanted the audience to feel electrified, but that we’re also very much inside Paul’s mind. We stripped back all our previous ideas and came back to a very simple set up. The hardest thing was matching the camera speed with the lip sync. I prefer to do everything on set rather than rely on post production, so everything you see in L’enfer is 100% real, only the colour grade was done afterwards. The lip sync and the various speeds, the travelling – all of that is real. Paul had to actually lip sync slowly with the music set to a high speed to make it match up.

The ‘story’ is split into three parts to represent his different states of mind. From my perspective, I saw the three parts like this: the first is the kind of explosive moment when everything starts to go badly and feel bad. Everything’s moving fast and there’s this sense of losing control. The second part is that realisation that you have to deal with this depression. Things slow down here, everything becomes more difficult as he starts to battle with himself. Then the third part is when you decide to fight back.