Filmmakers, from the pioneer Ali Ghanem to Mehdi Charef, Rachid Bouchareb, Hafsia Herzi or Lina Soualem, as well as actors Jamel Debbouze, Rachida Brakni, Roschdy Zem or Sami Bouajila, have helped shape a unique cultural history. Their careers, between France and the Maghreb, have helped redefine, across generations, the imaginaries of French cinema. 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 nouvelle histoire du cinéma français chooses to place itself on the side of the artists who, since the 1960s, have written large parts of the history of French cinema without that history ever having been told.
Through film excerpts, posters, shooting photographs, storyboards, iconic cinema objects such as Césars, and press archives, Une nouvelle histoire du cinéma français offers a concrete and sensitive crossing of this history. The exhibition brings into dialogue widely recognized works and others more rarely shown, sometimes restored or digitized for the occasion.
The exhibition ends with a sequence turned toward 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.