Discover ‘Sacrebleu : Chapter One’ – a sea‑born boy’s tale at the UN Ocean Conference

Alexandru Tomescu and the Nine-Chapter Indie Project That Premiered at the UN Ocean Conference

The third UN Ocean Conference, held in Nice in June 2025, drew heads of state, NGO leaders, and policy press for a week of negotiations that ended with the Nice Ocean Action Plan. Programmed inside that week, alongside the panels and the plenaries, was a short film about a boy born from the sea with a plastic bag over his head.

The film was Sacrebleu: Chapter One, written and directed by French filmmaker Clément Oberto. Oberto has structured the project as an “EPISODIC FEATURE FILM” of nine interconnected chapters, with the score by Ilya Lagutenko of Mumiy Troll, the Russian rock musician and ocean activist who has built one of Eastern Europe’s most recognised musical catalogues over three decades. Chapter One has accumulated sixteen festival awards on its run, according to the director’s portfolio, and is currently in what Oberto’s site calls a “final funding phase” for the rest of the chapter sequence.

The actor playing the closing role of Chapter One is Alexandru Tomescu, a Romanian performer based in Los Angeles. He plays Adult Enzo, the grown version of the child the audience meets at the start of the film, in a role that brings the metaphor of the title character into a recognisable human body.

The Project

Oberto frames Sacrebleu on his own portfolio in three lines: “Born from the sea. Wrapped in plastic. Searching for freedom.” The film, he writes, “makes those statistics human, showing what guilt, hope, and connection can look like when the son of the sea carries both the weight of damage and the dream of renewal.” The statistics he refers to are the ones invoked at the start of the project’s promotional materials. Over half of the planet’s oxygen comes from the ocean. More than eleven million tons of plastic enter its waters every year.

Chapter One follows Enzo through a surreal interior world, played as a child by American actor William Rozdilsky and as an adult by Tomescu. The cast also includes Nikole Filatova as Young Girl and Sunny Baca as Young Boy. The film is produced by Midnight Dive Productions, with Ksenia Wavy producing, and was shot by cinematographer Ernesto Lomeli with underwater work by Daren Crawford.

The UNOC3 selection is the credit on which the project’s commercial case currently rests. Environmental shorts more often run on the green-cinema festival circuit, a respected but narrow ecosystem. UNOC3, co-hosted by France and Costa Rica and convened to produce the Nice Ocean Action Plan, is a different kind of room. A short film about marine plastic landing inside that programme reaches an audience of policy press and conference delegates, rather than only a festival audience.

The Casting

The technical problem of Sacrebleu’s first chapter is the handover between child and adult Enzo. The audience watches Rozdilsky for the majority of the film, and Tomescu enters in the closing act. The interior life established by the child performer has to read as continuous in the adult body. Tomescu plays the closing chapter largely without dialogue.

“What drew me to it was the emotional layer of the character and the metaphorical world of the film,” Tomescu says of the role. “It gave me the space to explore something more abstract and internal, while still keeping it honest and human.”

The project gives him something more durable than a single short-film credit. Oberto’s nine-chapter structure means returning cast members accrue a multi-year working biography on a project that is already in international circulation. Few young actors at this stage are working inside that kind of pre-built continuity.

The Actor

Tomescu is a New York Film Academy graduate, trained in Los Angeles, originally from Caracal in southern Romania. Before Sacrebleu, his most exposed credit was a principal role in the launch film for România Educată, the national education project initiated by then-President Klaus Iohannis. The project ran for seven years as the longest public consultation on public policy in Romanian history, drew over 10,000 participants across regional debates and online consultation, and provided the policy framework for the education laws President Iohannis signed at Palatul Cotroceni on 4 July 2023. The launch film, posted by the Presidential Administration and rebroadcast across Romanian outlets including Știrile Pro TV, is the public-facing record of that consultation.

Tomescu’s working credits run across film, television, and commercial productions, principal in some, supporting in others. He has built a published portfolio of editorial and brand work alongside the acting, including a magazine feature and a series of campaigns. A short film he wrapped recently is now in post-production.

The cohort he enters with the Sacrebleu credit is small. Romanian actors based in Los Angeles working in English-language independent productions that demand interior performance are not a long bench. The closest reference points are the directors and actors associated with the Romanian New Wave and its successors, the tradition built by Cristian Mungiu, Cristi Puiu, and Corneliu Porumboiu, which asks an actor to be available to the camera without performing for it.

What Is Next

Oberto’s portfolio describes Sacrebleu as “currently in our final funding phase,” with eight further chapters in development. The score by Lagutenko gives the project an unusual cultural reach for an independent short, particularly across the Russian-speaking diaspora audiences that have followed Mumiy Troll since the 1990s. Tomescu’s continuing involvement in the cycle is one of the production’s stated assets.

Asked about his next move, Tomescu offers a working line rather than a pitch. “I’m open to the right opportunities, and interested in continuing to work on projects that feel creatively right.”

The next milestone for Sacrebleu is the next chapter. The next milestone for the actor in its closing role is whoever sees the UNOC3 credit on a CV and decides to send him a script. That part of the industry does not run on a public schedule.

What the UNOC3 selection has done is establish a baseline. The project is a documented work, with a verifiable festival itinerary, an internationally recognised composer, a feature-length structural plan, and an actor who shows up for the closing act of its first chapter. The rest is the next eight chapters of a film about a boy born from the sea.