A few days before the start of the Route du Rhum – Destination Guadeloupe, Thomas Ruyant allowed himself a break for an evening. More precisely, a return to the past. In front of the audience at the Théâtre Chateaubriand in Saint-Malo (Ille-et-Vilaine), the French skipper presented the documentary 29,173NM. A title that refers to the distance traveled by the skipper during the Vendée Globe 2020.
If Thomas Ruyant was at the helm throughout the crossing, this feature film was designed with four hands, those of the director Vincent Bonnemazou and those of the musician Molécule.
A first meeting fueled by ambition
The artist Molécule has the particularity of associating electronic music and extreme weather conditions. He produced the album Nazarea nod to the Portuguese city known to surfers for its huge waves, or even -22.7°, recorded in Greenland, under a polar cold. “I have been fascinated since I was very young by the sea, the sailors who go off alone at sea”, confides Molécule to 20 minutes.
His meeting with Thomas Ruyant will therefore be the starting point of the project. “I was dazzled by the character and his approach, both very ambitious on a sporting level and very profound on a societal level. I would not have made this film with a navigator and a sponsor who does not convey values to which I adhere, he admits. The quality of our relationship meant that we set off on an increasingly ambitious project. »
Sixteen microphones and thirteen cameras on board
“During a sea trip, remembers Thomas Ruyant, it had started to rain and from inside the boat, it started to resonate like in a guitar box. “A scene that marked Molecule. “The first idea was to sail with him on a transatlantic, to create a music album,” he explains.
“Covid-19 and the lockdowns canceled all that, and we found ourselves thinking about something else. As the Vendée Globe is a solo race, I thought of a way to accompany it, without actually being there”, specifies Thomas Ruyant. Thus, for 29,173NM, a special device was required. No less than 13 cameras and 16 microphones were scattered on board the boat. A multimedia orchestra nicknamed “OSWALD”.
“At the same time bluffing and scary”
“It was important for Vincent Bonnemazou and me to give life to OSWALD, who is a central character in the film. It is he who tells us about this film, through his eyes and his ears. The idea was to be able to observe Thomas, a bit like a laboratory animal, but with a lot of benevolence,” says Molécule. “It was a technical challenge to put things in place, because we have weight and energy constraints,” explains Thomas Ruyant.
“I was the one who had the hand on the trigger [des caméras et du son]. Except that we had some problems during the race, and there were finally triggers without my realizing it. I let this film be made and the result is quite stunning, sometimes scary. But at the same time, what we do, it is sometimes. When I see this film, I feel what I felt during the Vendée Globe. » In Saint-Malo, 29,173 this was its third preview (after those in Sables-d’Olonnes and Lorient). The documentary made between land and sea will be broadcast to the public in the second half of 2023.