Les Trésors de Marcel Pagnol

In 2014, Tsai Ming-Liang was invited to make a film for the MarseilleFID, Marseille International Film Festival. Since he was not familiar with Marseille, he decided to make a film as tourist, capturing the beautiful Mediterranean sunshine in the late summer of that year. He also invited famous French actor, Denis Lavant, to appear alongside Lee Kang-Sheng playing Xuanzang. "Journey to the West" was invited to be the opening short film at the Berlin International Film Festival the same year.

"Welcome to my life", Sylvie Hofmann repeats this sentence almost all day long. Sylvie has been a nurse for 40 years at the North Hospital of Marseille. Her life is running. Between patients, her sick mother, her husband and her daughter, she has always devoted her life to helping others. What if she decided to think a little about herself? To retire? Does she have the right, but above all, does she really want to?

Lara, a German au pair, recently arrived in Marseille, where a new life is beginning for her. Being an introverted young girl, she nevertheless throws herself into the unknown, into the twists and turns of a city whose codes she still does not know.

Off the coast of Marseille, near a rocky cliff, a Greek ship was discovered at a depth of forty meters in Mediterranean waters, loaded with amphorae and other pottery. The cargo has been lying on that sandy stretch of seabed for more than two thousand years. The documentary follows the dives of divers who recover cups, vases, plates and jars still full of wine. We are also witnessing new recovery systems, with the use of compressed air.

This film is dedicated to Mas-Félipe Delavouët, the poet discovered by Lawrence Durrell, who wrote 14,000 verses in Provençal over a period of thirty years, and who died on November 18, 1990. "The sky, history and Mediterranean and Provençal myths are the inexhaustable wellspring of this man rooted down there, near Salon-de-Provence" (J.-D. Pollet). "Mas-Félipe Delavouët wrote five books in Provençal, 14,000 verses. A sort of "Odyssey". Of myths. What is stunning in him is that he always talks of disappearances. Cities, works, men, writings, television, etc., everything has to disappear. In order to be reborn. No pain. A sort of hand-to-hand of man and nature. During the filming, I would simply throw out some words... For example, one time I said "creation" and he said: "creation doesn't exist..., creation is before me..., I can only read creation"; this sentence describes Delavouët perfectly (J.-D. Pollet, 1989 and 1993).

80 years ago, Marseille's Old Port was the scene of a tragic event that is still largely unknown today: the roundup and total destruction of the Saint-Jean district, on Hitler's own orders. "The Forgotten Round-up" draws on the memories of some of the last direct witnesses to the tragedy, and follows the investigation of Marseille lawyer Pascal Luongo, grandson of one of the victims.

Dutch documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens follows the course of the famous wind as it originates in the Alps and finds its way to the Mediterranean Sea. Natural sounds and creative camera work provide a mood film showing the effect of the fury of the wind on the life of southern France.

Valérie Jouve is a weel-known photographer, and Grand Littoral is her first film. Out the outskirts of Marseille, in a landscape criss-crossed by motorways, railways and srubland paths, some figures that seem to be from her famous photos passby and bump into each other. They act as our guides in a tour without beginning or end. How do you look at a place without taking possession of it? How do you describe characters without confining them within a given plot? How do you make the transition from still shots to moving pictures? this brief, musical film leaves us asking these and other unresolved questions.

This film brings to life, thanks to unknown footage from the great American director William Wyler, an important period in the history of Corsica during World War II. In 1944, the Alto base near Folelli was home to both a group of fighter-bombers from the U.S. Army Air Force (the 57th Fighter Group) and the famous French Lafayette fighter group. Day after day, the young pilots of these two units took off from the Alto runway in their P-47 Thunderbolts to attack, strafe, and bomb the German troops who, in Italy, had halted the Allied advance at Monte Cassino and participated in the Provence landings in August 1944. Isabelle Clarke and Daniel Costelle tracked down the pilots, and sixty years later, these pilots are reunited...