Victor Young Perez: A Lacklustre Sports Biopic

Abstract

Although cinema took up the issue of sport in Nazi concentration and extermination camps as early as 1963 with the film The Boxer and Death, it was only in 2013 that Jacques Ouaniche released the film Victor Young Perez, a film completely dedicated to the career of the French boxer of the same name, who was crowned world boxing champion in 1931 and deported to Auschwitz in October 1943. Rooted in cultural history, this paper looks at the political context and cultural universe, as well as the memorial dynamics and conflicts of interest against which the film was produced in France. Resuscitated in an article of L’Équipe in 1992, the trajectory of Young Perez only found its way into the memory of French sport at the beginning of the 2000s when the ‘duty to remember’ flooded public space. The paper also intends to understand why Jacques Ouaniche’s biopic enjoyed only moderate success. The dialogue between fiction and reality, the distancing from historical facts and the storyline constitute the main areas explored.