Filmmakers, from the pioneer Ali Ghanem to Mehdi Charef, Rachid Bouchareb, Hafsia Herzi or Lina Soualem, and actors such as Jamel Debbouze, Rachida Brakni, Roschdy Zem or Sami Bouajila, have helped shape a distinctive cultural history. Their careers, between France and the Maghreb, have helped redefine the imaginaries of French cinema across generations. Their films, often pioneering, have opened the way to unprecedented stories, blending the experience of exile, the quest for identity and the renewal of cinematic forms.
Rather than focusing on the figures of immigration as they have been represented on screen, Une histoire du cinéma français chooses to take the side of the artists who, since the 1960s, have written large sections of the history of French cinema without this history ever having been told.
Through film extracts, posters, set photographs, storyboards, iconic cinema objects such as Césars, and press archives, Une histoire du cinéma français offers a concrete and sensitive journey through this history. The exhibition brings into dialogue widely recognised works and others that are more rarely shown, some restored or digitised for the occasion.
The exhibition ends with a sequence turned towards the future: the irruption of genre cinema, the importance of women, formal freedom, the boldness of narratives and the emergence of new voices circulating between the two shores.
This exhibition is part of the Saison Méditerranée 2026.
Curation
Exhibition curation
Clémentine Deroudille, exhibition curator, author and director.
Lucile Humbert Beldjoudi, audiovisual projects manager at the Musée national de l'histoire de l'immigration, creator of the cinema residency Horizons.
Supported by Chloé Dupont, exhibition officer at the Musée national de l'histoire de l'immigration.
Scientific and artistic support
Aurélie Cardin, creator of the Festival CinéBanlieue.
Solange Poulet, initiator of the creation of Aflam in Marseille.