L’heure d’hiver 2025 : Napoli

Each year, L’Heure d’Hiver invites you to explore a city from the Mediterranean basin through the lens of cinema, uncovering the many facets of its identity, history, and culture. For this 7th edition, we turn our focus to Naples, a captivating city where past and present, splendor and chaos, reality and legend intertwine.

With its vibrant cinematography, Naples embodies a stage for lives, passions, and contradictions. Through restored archival films, recent fiction works, and compelling documentaries, we invite you to immerse yourself in this global city. Naples reveals itself in turn as a mosaic of neighborhoods, a stage for social struggles, a cradle of artistic inspiration, and a character in its own right.

Through a selection of ten carefully chosen films, in collaboration with our co-curator, Neapolitan producer Gerardo di Vivo, and an exhibition, we address a variety of issues impacting Naples, the emblematic city of southern Italy. From mafia-related organized crime to gambling addiction among some of its residents, and the excesses tied to the rise of short-term rentals, this edition highlights the major urban transformations redefining the city and deeply affecting its social fabric. These new (and harmful) habits of property owners have a significant impact on the historic center: over 10,000 homes are now exclusively reserved for tourist rentals, gradually stifling local life and threatening the very soul of this Mediterranean city.

Through these perspectives from both past and present, we aim not only to celebrate Naples’ rich cinematic heritage but also to explore the challenges faced by a city marking its 2,500th anniversary this year.