Notre-Dame on Fire

Notre-Dame on Fire (Notre-Dame brûle, 2022) is a French drama directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud — watch it online on iFILM. Annaud built it not as a meditation on cultural loss but as a procedural account of April 15, 2019: what actually happened, hour by hour, inside and around one of the most visited buildings on earth.

The fire starts in the scaffolding during restoration work. Within minutes, firefighters are trying to map a building none of them have trained in. Volunteers race to pull irreplaceable relics from the nave. Priests hold their ground. Incident commanders make calls with almost no reliable information coming back. Samuel Labarthe, Jules Sadoughi, and Chloé Jouannet are among the cast reconstructing the night from emergency logs, witness accounts, and declassified firefighting records.

Annaud shot portions on location in and around the cathedral, and the film carries the texture of real crisis management rather than dramatized heroism — which makes it both more credible and somewhat less cinematic than a traditional disaster picture. If you want the account rather than the eulogy, stream Notre-Dame on Fire (2022) online on iFILM.