From November 29 to December 6, the Mediterranean Festival in Images brings together in Marseille films by directors from more than ten countries in the region: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Algeria, Lebanon, Italy, Israel, Palestine, Tunisia, and France. This event is an opportunity to remind us – at a time when social networks value short and even very short content – of the power of documentary to shed light on crises, transmit memory, and open debate. This dimension is now cultivated by PriMed by raising awareness among young people, as more than 3000 high school students from both shores will actively participate in this 2025 edition.
By Olivier Martocq - Journalist
AI Index: Library of Mediterranean Knowledge In Marseille, PriMed exalts the long duration of documentary 22-med – November 2025 • The PriMed festival defends documentary as a space for reflection in the face of the saturation of short and fragmented images. • In Marseille, films, debates, and high school students create a different perspective on the fractures and memories of the Mediterranean. #documentary #festival #marseille #mediterranean #youth #audiovisual #cinema #culture
In Marseille, the Mediterranean annually fills the dark rooms to tell its fractures, its impulses, and its memories. For this 29th edition, the Mediterranean Festival in Images brings together 25 documentary films and reports. A panorama that, according to Valérie Gerbault, general delegate of the Mediterranean Center for Audiovisual Communication (CMCA), organizer of the event, offers “an incisive and deeply human perspective on the plural realities of the Mediterranean.” The works presented tell of ecological urgency, the persistence of conflicts, questions of memory, or social struggles. They especially show how this region-continent, far from being reduced to the dramas that traverse it, remains a space of narrative inventions and unique perspectives.
For Valérie Gerbault, documentary remains an irreplaceable tool: “It allows for in-depth treatment of subjects, which we no longer have the opportunity to do. And it offers a perspective that the public can then question, debate, and contradict.”
The Long Time Against the Flow of Images
In a world saturated with fragmented images, the festival claims a political gesture: to slow down. “We are overwhelmed with images stripped of meaning,” recalls Italian director Giuseppe Schillaci*. The documentary restores presence to reality. This is even more important today than fiction.” His film Bosco Grande, presented in the category - art, cultures, and societies of the Mediterranean - follows Sergio, a popular figure from a neighborhood in Palermo, a tattoo artist, musician, and an immobile obese character. Giuseppe Schillaci explains: “I wanted to film a frozen humanity, a city that hasn’t moved, where places protected from marketing and consumption still exist.”
This idea of reality as an expression of truth also runs through more political works, whether it’s the follow-up of Palestinian families under bombardment in Gaza (Life and Death in Gaza) and its counterpoint (Holding Liat), the testimony of a former Israeli hostage kidnapped on October 7, 2023, and her family's fight for her release. Whether it’s the fight against pollution in Bosnia (The Sky Above Zenica) or the investigation into the transmission of the Arabic language in France (Mauvaise Langue).
Each time, the documentary does not simply inform: it creates a space to see and hear those who are the anonymous figures of History.
A Space Where Young People Speak Up
For more than fifteen years, PriMed has cultivated a unique option: to encourage young people to step out of the role of mere spectators and become jurors, debaters, and even directors.
The Mediterranean Youth Prize mobilizes this year more than 3000 high school students mainly from the French region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, but also from Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Italy, and Tunisia. These students will have watched three documentaries in class beforehand, before gathering in Marseille to debate and vote. For Valérie Gerbault, this approach is fundamental: “In their daily lives, they consume images at high speed on social networks. We offer them a moment of pause, a subject, a perspective, a reflection, and above all a chance to speak where their opinion matters.”
The debates, sometimes intense, allow for improbable encounters between high school students from Marseille, Nice, Port-Said, Rabat, Algiers, Sousse…, between young people from privileged neighborhoods and others. “They never cross paths. Here, they debate, they discover each other, they listen to each other,” insists Valérie Gerbault. And sometimes, a voice is liberated. The festival organizer recounts the moving testimony of a young girl in a hijab revealing after a screening that dealt with sexual violence that she herself had been raped. “A moment of collective empathy that justifies alone, she says, the necessity of this space.”
These sessions are complemented by master classes with directors and the “Me, Mediterranean Citizen” prize, which invites high school students to become authors of short films themselves. Films of one minute to start, but based on a script.
Crossed Perspectives on a Shaken Mediterranean
The 2025 edition also reflects the current shocks experienced by the Mediterranean region. For the general delegate of CMCA, the themes evolve but maintain a consistency:
the persistence of violence against women (with The Promise of Imane), questions of languages and identities (Mauvaise Langue), political and judicial legacies (The 1957 Transcript), and especially the scars of past and present wars, particularly in films about Israel and Gaza. “We do not provide solutions, we do not take positions. We solicit a perspective and then open the debate,” insists Valérie Gerbault.
Because it is around the triptych of plurality of angles, freedom of the public, and circulation of speech that PriMed indeed intends to build coherence.
Television, a Refuge for Documentary
If cinemas remain the dream destination, the reality is more prosaic: the majority of PriMed films find their audiences through television and streaming platforms. Valérie Gerbault reminds us that three broadcasters from the Mediterranean basin - 2M (Morocco), RAI (Italy), and France 3 Corse Via Stella (France) - commit to programming the award-winning works, thus offering rare visibility in a landscape where screens dedicated to documentaries are shrinking. Italian director Giuseppe Schillaci confirms this: “Without television, many films would not exist.” This mode of distribution not only allows reaching a wide audience but also preserves a diversity of productions that have no outlets elsewhere.
In a Mediterranean often told through the crises it undergoes, the festival reminds us that the image can also be a space for repair, memory, or artistic experimentation. “Together, we outline the contours of a more open and peaceful Mediterranean,” writes Valérie Gerbault in the festival's editorial. Pauline Labarthe, the graphic designer who created the poster, summarizes the idea in a drawing: “This seagull disguised as a dove for peace wants to send a message of hope for a peaceful future in this Mediterranean that needs it so much.” A fragile horizon, but one that the films presented, through their humanity and intensity, help to make tangible.
*Giuseppe SCHILLACI is a director, screenwriter, and executive producer, responsible for development and production assistance. He is also a writer, his second novel L’ETÀ DEFINITIVA was published in 2015. His documentary LE MODERNISSIMO DE BOLOGNE won the Art, Heritage, and Cultures of the Mediterranean Prize at the 27th edition of PriMed.