The archive · Advertising · Marketing decision · 2024
CANAL+ 'Super' turns an air emergency into a calm, digressive phone call
A panicked flight attendant calls air traffic control about two unconscious pilots — and the controller takes his time, digressing until the very end.
CANAL+
What it had to solve
CANAL+ released 'Super', a brand film built on the most familiar of action-movie emergencies: a plane in trouble. Eric, an experienced air traffic controller about to leave the tower, takes a call from Hélène, a panicked flight attendant whose two pilots are unconscious. Every genre convention says the next minutes will be a race against the clock, and the script sets that expectation up again and again.
How it works
In April 2024 CANAL+ released 'Super', a brand film that opens in the most familiar of action-movie situations: a plane in trouble. Eric, an experienced air traffic controller preparing to leave the control tower, receives a call from Hélène, a young flight attendant who is totally panicked because both her pilots are unconscious.
The film's move is to refuse the race against the clock. Each time the viewer expects Eric to give instructions and be efficient, he instead calms Hélène down and interrogates her at length, digressing until the very end; the emergency is never resolved early, so the suspense is built entirely out of the fix that keeps not arriving.
By making the audience's own impatience the comedy, the spot turns a single phone call into the whole story. The D&AD awards archive preserves the work with CANAL+ credited as brand and SOME Films as production company; the page records no viewer or sales figures.
Why it lands
- Every viewer already knows the air-emergency formula, so the film plays against a shared expectation instead of explaining anything.
- Withholding the rescue turns impatience into tension: the longer Eric digresses, the more the audience needs to know how it ends.
- The whole scene is one phone call, which makes the idea cheap to stage and entirely dependent on dialogue and performance.
- An ad that refuses its payoff until the end earns attention in a medium that usually gives endings away in the first ten seconds.
What it did
The effect is structural: viewers keep waiting for instructions that never arrive when expected, turning one phone conversation into the whole film. The work is preserved in the D&AD Awards archive among film and direction entries; the page records no audience or sales figures, and coverage of the launch concentrated on how the story ends.
What you can take
A viewer who knows exactly what a genre demands will stay for the moment it is denied: withholding the expected rescue is the suspense.
Since then
Industry coverage of the April 2024 launch centred on whether the plane would survive, and awards-season records list the film as an online-film finalist at the 2024 London International Awards. The D&AD awards archive keeps the work with credits for CANAL+ and SOME Films; the page records no audience numbers, so the case stands on the structural idea: a life-or-death emergency told by a hero who takes his time.
Sources
spotted an error? The archive wants to know.
Your turn
You just read one. Describe the brief you are staring at, and see who has been given the same problem.
Free account · 3 free questions · no card