L’heure d’été Marseille

From its foundation around 600 BC by the Greeks of Phocaea to the present day, Marseille, one of the oldest cities in France, has been built up in successive layers, bringing their share of history and particularly strong cultural dynamics.

The largest French port and one of the main ports of the Mediterranean, there are few traces of its past and its heritage. Marseille is in perpetual construction. The cinematographic landscape of Marseille testifies to this and allows us to navigate in this complex city, through its popular history and its multiple facets. A meeting place for the great classics of the French new wave, for mainstream and popular films, Marseille is the scene of an explosive artistic richness that still persists in the 7th art as much as in contemporary artistic and musical creation.

European Capital of Culture 2013, the city of Marseille hosted a year of exhibitions, concerts, shows and meetings. In 2020, Manifesta, the biennial of European creation, took place in Marseille, many initiatives aiming at linking Europe to the Mediterranean area.

There is still a lot to be said about Marseille, and it is in this spirit that we wish to praise the city of Marseilles this summer 2022 through screenings, meetings, debates, open-air cinema and an exhibition about this multiple city.

There are many connections between Marseille and Brussels, particularly in artistic creation. The Mucem in Marseille collaborates, for example, with Bozar on European artistic projects or with the ERG (Saint-Luc) for higher education projects. La Friche Belle de mai collaborates with the CWB in Paris on the production of exhibitions that promote the work of Belgian artists in France, and in particular in Marseille where an exhibition bringing together several artists from the CWB was held on the occasion of Manifesta 13 in 2020.

Marseille is a city with strong art cinemas, close to our programs such as La Baleine, or strong cinematographic initiatives such as the FID. This multidisciplinarity between art and cinema is specific to the messages and the cinema that we wish to bring to each heure d’été festival. It is as much in its current and past cultural richness that we wish to present the cinema and the artistic creation of Marseille in all its states!

Our previous heure d’été Hors série festival focused on bringing cinema to places in Brussels where it is not usually represented. This axis gave rise to rich associative partnerships with structures such as Pooliscool with whom we presented films in an open-air ephemeral swimming pool or Cultureghem with whom we proposed movie meals from the unsold market in the slaughterhouses. These initiatives will be repeated but this time focusing on the city of Marseille with projections in atypical places.