This is good news for football fans. Deprived of sports programs because of the coronavirus pandemic and confined to reruns during this period of confinement, they will be able to watch the documentary Enemy brothers, from Grégory Gomez and Alexis Magand, which is offered for free access on the internet, via the vimeo platform, since this Tuesday.
Subtitled “Sainté vs Lyon, 7 jours au Coeur d’A Passion”, the film follows fans from both camps, with a sociological perspective, during the days preceding the derby between Lyonnais and Stéphanois in Gerland. In 2015, the authors toured the Monts du Lyonnais, the border between the two departments. They tried to decipher, through funny, virulent, sometimes moving testimonies, the mechanisms of this opposition. They even found a couple, one of whom is an aficionado of the Greens and his deeply supportive OL partner, and who met through the derby, fighting each other regularly but ending up hand in hand once the match was over.
Dive back into the fever rise before a derby
“More than a sports film, it is a film with a sociological approach to understand where this animosity between the two clubs, the two cities comes from,” explained Alexis Magand in our columns in the fall of 2017, when the The documentary was shown as a preview in the Méliès cinemas in Saint-Étienne and the Ant in Lyon, at the time of a meeting lived in such a passionate way in both camps.
The co-director also spoke of his personal experience of the rivalry between Lyon and Saint-Etienne when approaching this match: “I was not completely but on arriving in Lyon I was sent back in the face that I was Stéphanois, in an amused way, but that pushed me to claim more and more my belonging to Saint-Etienne. I was not brought up in an animosity towards Lyon, but when the match approaches, it’s animal, it takes guts. It’s quite strange to explain. “
In 1h03, this documentary thus allows to occupy its confinement by plunging back into the rise in fever which always precedes this essential meeting of the football season that is the derby between OL and ASSE.