The Italian producer Enrico Ghezzi commissioned the movie to Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet to celebrate Roberto Rossellini's centenary. Asked to imagine a moment in the life or the death of Ingrid Bergman's character in Europe '51 (1952), their reading of Rossellini yielded this political pamphlet about the death of two Parisian youngsters who, chased by the police, hid in a high-voltage electric transformer and burned to death. Less than three weeks after their death, the banlieus were burning.