Paris, 2054. Ilona Tassueiv (Romola Garai), a brilliant young researcher is violently kidnapped. No ransom is demanded and initial attempts to find her are in vain. Avalon, a giant multinational corporation and her employer, wants her to be found at any cost. Dellenbach (Jonathan Pryce), Avalon’s CEO, has requested that Officer Bartholomew Karas (Daniel Craig), a hostage retrieval specialist and the most controversial cop in the force, be in charge of the case...

Karas finds a connection between Ilona and disgraced scientist Dr Jonas Muller (Ian Holm), and he meets Ilona’s equally beautiful sister Bislane (Catherine McCormack). He builds up an intriguing picture of the missing girl and, as the snow begins to fall, he retraces her movements through the urban jungles that are the new Parisian districts: he is spied on and threatened, witnesses are assassinated and someone tries to kill him.

The cop no longer knows if his quarry is victim or villain, angel or monster. Tracking Ilona down becomes a matter of life or death for Karas and perhaps for the whole of civilization. She holds the scientific key to a protocol, which could determine the future of the human race; whether man can be made God: the Renaissance protocol.

As an edgy thriller, Renaissance finds itself at the crossroads of several genres. It is representative of our times because it contains several different influences, mixing humanity and pop culture. This world, in its entirety, reflects the interior state of the characters.

The idea of using monochrome was to return to the roots of cinema, in its raw and primal form. This radical monochrome element meant we could transcend the technological problems allowing us to avoid the usual problems of rendering skin tones. Linked to Mocap, we find ourselves plunged into a particular world which goes beyond the traditional duality of animation and real action films. The effect in the cinema is new. The image is defined only by the dapples of white light from the projector. The viewer loses the idea of a frame and becomes absorbed in a world without frontiers.