“The dank, arresting visual style Caro perfected (...) on Delicatessen and City of Lost Children and on latter's Alien: Resurrection is alive and well in this wearing assault on the senses.” - Variety

"Dante 01 offers a vision of hell that you may well find heavenly"
- Channel 4

Orbiting over a hellish planet called Dante, a space station conducts bizarre psychiatric evaluations on its patients. When a new prisoner nicknamed "Saint George" is admitted, the doctors at first think everything is normal. All is not as it seems though, as Saint George possesses the uncanny ability to remove the security implants from other prisoners' bodies.

Continuing a relationship that began 15 years ago with The City of Lost Children, BUF worked closely with director Marc Caro for one year to help the him realize his vision of Dante 01, a corporate-owned Psychiatric Detention Center orbiting the fiery planet of Dante. One of the rare French Sci-Fi films ever, Dante 01 offers a re-interpretation at the first cantica of the Divine Comedy. It also displays a unique aesthetic mixing genre classics with indigenous images and cultural mythologies.

The film faced a variety of challenges driving a creative process to find solutions that worked within it's budget. Marc Caro counted on the BUF team to meet these challenges and maximize his resources.“For me, every film is an inferno,” he jokes. The budget was not that of a blockbuster, either. “Barely € 4.5 million,” said Caro, “so I had to make a virtue of necessity.”

There are many marvelous sequences in Dante 01: the literal defrosting of Saint-Georges, Saint-Georges' visions of the parasites, and a dive into a cooling tank. For these sequences, a wide variety of techniques were employed, specifically in three categories of VFX:

- The 3D VFX (70 shots) were the primary challenges for BUF as they required the most research. For the Outer Space sequences, the main elements designed were: the Psychiatric Detention Center (inspired by Russian architecture), the hellish Planet Dante (its surface a crackling fire-and-brimstone concoction) and the Space Ship. The nanotech injection also represented an important challenge as it displays a kind of nested doll principle going through various microscopic Full-CG macrocosms (produced in a record-time of 6 weeks). BUF's main contribution was the film's finale: the Full-CG Entity was developed over a 6 month period in order to achieve the best representation of the evil inside the hero. Other 3D visual effects include Saint-George's visions as he discovers the interior of the body through various anatomic and mystical layers.

- For the 2D VFX (80 shots), the effects were: Character Enhancement effects in order to create Saint George's mystical subjugation; Bright Eye effects distorting his eyes; Alien Glow effects making the creature look luminous and diaphanous. Other effects include: graphic interfaces showing the monitoring of the prisoners; and a Dizziness effect when Saint George's state of mind is altered by drugs. BUF was also responsible for the grading of the film, pushing the limits of color in many ways.

- Finally, some post-process treatments (180 shots) were used for the following sequences: the video monitoring (scratches deteriorating the images from the DV cameras), the psychedelic montage (final sequence) and the pumping effect (subjective sequences that went were enhanced with a 2D pumping effect amplifying the anxiety of the main character).