Monument is a company created in January 2024 by Marc Sauvourel, specializing in direction and production of documentaries, mainly sports films.
Reporter for 13 years in the Canal+ sports department (2008-2021), I devote myself to directing sports documentaries for Canal+ from 2017.
My first collaboration with former international football player Olivier Dacourt, Ma part d’ombre (2018), recounts the confessions of great football players, including Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Thierry Henry and Franck Ribéry, telling the difficulties they went through on their journey.
A year later, Je ne suis pas un singe (2019) focuses specifically on the scourge of racism in football through the personal experiences of World champions Patrick Vieira and Samuel Umtiti, Cameroonian legends Samuel Eto’o and Joseph-Antoine Bell, Italian striker Mario Balotelli, English defender Sol Campbell.
In our third documentary, Papa (2021), Olivier Dacourt then sets off to meet « sons and daughters of » legends of French sport. From Joakim and Yannick Noah, Emile and Romain Ntamack, the powerful and intimate testimonies of these champions children, enriched with unpublished family archives, retrace the most glorious hours of French sport and express all the complexity of filiation in professional sport.
Le crépuscule des champions (2022) explores the throes of the end of a career in high-level sport. Retired or active athletes, swimmer Florent Manaudou, skier Sandra Laoura, fencer Laura Flessel, football player Djibril Cissé, rugby player Mathieu Bastareaud and tennis player Gilles Simon, share with Olivier Dacourt their experience of the shift of their life as a champion towards its inexorable end.
In 2019, in Lionnes, I follow the daily life of young girls playing football and dreaming of following in the footsteps of their idol Amel Majri, a professional player of the French national team.
In 2020, I initiate the very first documentary series of Canal+ program Sport Reporter, Stades, of which I direct three episodes. Discovering the craziest football fields on the planet, the series takes us to the middle of Lake Titicaca in Peru, to the borders of the Himalayas, to the Gorée island in Senegal and beyond the Arctic Circle.
That same year, my documentary Out of the rain, about the coronation of the legendary english football club Liverpool in the middle of the Covid pandemic after thirty years of waiting, is awarded the Special Jury Prize at the SPORTEL Awards in Monaco.
In 2021, Azad, the story of an Iranian judoka who defies Teheran regime by agreeing to fight his Israeli opponent, receives the Best Feature Documentary prize at the Hong Kong World Film Festival.
In October 2021, I join the production company Little Darwin Films,created by David Tiago Ribeiro, of which I become co-manager.
With David, we direct and produce the first documentary film about Victor Wembanyama, the first French man drafted first overall in NBA history, UN1QUE, a world exclusive, broadcasted from October 2023 on Canal+ and its platform, MyCanal.
In January 2024, I create my own structure, Monument, with the same ambition to offer immersive documentary films, built in a modern aesthetic, on world sport « monuments » whose I want to continue to tell destinies and emotions with precision and sensitivity.
