A half-billion dollar project. A crushing architectural challenge. An impossible deadline. Two political adversaries—and a blind competition. What could go wrong?

Set in 1982, Building Bastille! recounts the improbable tale of how a little-known Canadian architect, Carlos Ott, won the commission to build Paris’s new opera house—thanks to a blind submission mistaken for a design by Richard Meier. Drama erupts when right-wing Prime Minister Jacques Chirac halts the project, clashing with Socialist President Mitterrand. But, as with all French politics, things are never as they seem. A comedic and dramatic saga, this documentary tells one of modern architecture’s most unlikely success stories.