a Man Named Thierry Frémaux

A Look Back at Festival Lumière 2026

Between Architecture, Medicine, Literature, and

Narges Samadi | Film Critic & Festival Journalist

Lyon, France | October 2026

Film Restoration and Architecture

Festival Lumière had begun, and full of excitement and anticipation, I went straight from the airport to its press office. The person in charge of international press relations had previously told me that they would wait for me to collect my press badge and invitation. Before I had even properly entered the world of the festival, I encountered my first experience of the staff’s warmth and hospitality. This kindness repeated itself many times over the following days and became part of my memories of Lyon.

When I arrived at the Grand Hôtel-Dieu, the architecture momentarily interrupted my journey's urgency. The historic entrance, long corridors, succession of vaulted passageways, and delicate blend of old architecture with contemporary spaces captivated me. I wanted to spend hours wandering through the building. But there was no time to linger. I had to hurry to a conference marking the French Film Critics’ Association's eightieth anniversary, followed by the festival’s opening ceremony.

For someone like me, whose interests have always included architecture, encountering a historic building is never simply a matter of admiring its beauty, grandeur, or age. I see architecture as history written upon geography—a history that remains in walls, corridors, windows, and even the silence of buildings.

In cinema, too, I do not regard architecture merely as a location or an element of production design. To me, architecture is part of cinema's language. It can shape mise-en-scène, organize characters' movements, establish distances between people, direct the spectator’s gaze, and even influence narrative structure. Space in cinema is not always the background against which events unfold; sometimes it becomes a bearer of history, power, memory, and human relationships.

But architecture, for me, is not limited to construction. Restoration, too, is a form of architecture: the architecture of rereading, rebuilding, and sometimes bringing something back to life that time has marked.

In restoring a building, the question is not simply how to preserve its walls and columns, but how to understand its spatial and historical logic and find a way for it to continue living in the present. Film restoration asks a similar question: how can we recover a work's image, sound, colour, texture, and rhythm without altering its historical and aesthetic identity?

Despite their technical differences, these two forms of restoration converge on one point: both require understanding the work’s structure, respect for its past, and decisions about its relationship with the present.

In those first moments, I knew little about the history of the Grand Hôtel-Dieu. I knew only that I was standing inside a building with a long past, one that had now found a new life. But over the next few days, the more I read, the more meaningful the connections became between the building, the history of medicine, the Lumière brothers, and film restoration.

For someone who spent more than twenty years in medicine, particularly in emergency departments, and whose life is now connected to cinema, film criticism, and the history of images, this convergence carried deep personal meaning.

Here, two kinds of memory stood side by side: the memory preserved in stone, walls, vaults, and architecture, and the memory recorded on negatives, film stock, and other carriers of image and sound.

And during those same days, another name increasingly occupied my thoughts: Thierry Frémaux.

A Festival That Does More Than Screen Films

Before travelling to Lyon, I knew Thierry Frémaux, like many serious cinema enthusiasts, primarily through the Cannes Film Festival. For years, he has selected and presented films at one of the world’s major cinematic institutions. His name is associated with announcing Competition selections, press conferences, controversial decisions, and the presence of internationally renowned filmmakers at Cannes.

But in Lyon, I encountered another side of his work.

At Festival Lumière, Thierry Frémaux is not simply a director overseeing a cinematic programme. He stands before audiences, speaks about film history, recalls the names of filmmakers and actors, draws connections between works and different periods of cinema, and sometimes turns a brief introduction into a learning opportunity.

As the festival progressed, I became increasingly interested in him. His command of film history, humour, energy, and close relationship with audiences caught my attention. At times, I wondered how someone carrying such considerable responsibilities could still introduce a film he might have seen dozens of times with such enthusiasm. Where did this extraordinary wealth of information, names, dates, memories, and connections between films and filmmakers come from?

For someone who has spent years watching films, writing about cinema, and still considers herself a student of the medium, this experience was particularly significant.

I have attended many international film festivals, from Cannes and Venice to Toronto, Locarno, and Karlovy Vary. Each festival has its own identity, history, and way of engaging with cinema.

Yet in Lyon, something drew my attention that I had rarely considered so closely: the difference between screening a film and creating the conditions for it to be seen and understood.

At many festivals, we focus primarily on discovering new films. Schedules are demanding, screenings follow one another, and critics must watch, take notes, compare, and write within a limited period of time.

At Lumière, however, there is another experience: returning to films already made, films about which decades of criticism may already have been written.

Such a return is not necessarily repetition. A film we watched in our youth may acquire an entirely different meaning years later. When placed alongside other films and discussions, a historical work may reveal dimensions that previously escaped our attention.

Festival Lumière was founded in Lyon in 2009, a city whose history is inseparable from the invention of the Cinématographe and the Lumière brothers' early screenings. The festival’s identity centers on film history, classic works, restored films, and tributes to filmmakers.

But what mattered to me during its eighteenth edition was not simply the film selection. It was the way the festival transformed cinema history into a living, collective experience.

Here, classic films were not merely works from the past being shown again in restored versions. Each film could spark a conversation—about its production, the social and political conditions of its time, its cinematic language, and its influence on later generations.

In such an environment, introducing a film before its screening could become something far more meaningful than a ceremonial preface.

When someone like Thierry Frémaux spoke about a film with historical knowledge, cinematic memory, and personal enthusiasm, he invited the audience to notice details that might otherwise remain invisible.

For me, with my serious interest in film criticism, this experience also raised a professional question: is the critic’s role limited to analyzing and judging a film, or can a critic, through knowledge and expression, open a path towards rediscovering it?

During discussions devoted to film criticism, conversations about the critic’s responsibility and how to inspire interest in cinema brought me back to this question.

A critic can establish a new relationship between a film and its audience. This relationship doesn't necessarily begin with agreement or disagreement about a work’s artistic merit, but sometimes with curiosity, questions, and a desire to understand.

At the festival’s opening ceremony, the screening of Ettore Scola’s Una giornata particolare (A Special Day, 1977) immediately suggested the kind of event I was about to experience.

A film portraying the relationship between two human beings under the shadow of Fascist Italy could still, nearly half a century later, confront audiences with questions of loneliness, power, and human dignity.

At Lumière, films like this are not screened simply because they are old. They offer opportunities to reconsider film history and its relationship with contemporary life.

Books, Signings, and Conversations:

Where Cinema Meets Literature

Another aspect of Festival Lumière that fascinated me was the place of books and book-signing events within the festival.

At many film festivals, books remain on the margins. A small bookshop or a publication may accompany a tribute to a filmmaker. But what I experienced in Lyon went far beyond a few books beside the screening rooms.

Books were part of the festival’s cultural identity.

Book presentations, conversations with authors, researchers, and critics, and opportunities to meet them at signing sessions created a direct relationship between cinema audiences and those who think and write about film.

I have always believed that cinema cannot be separated from the other arts. Literature, painting, architecture, music, and philosophy have each contributed, in their own ways, to the development of cinematic language.

But the relationship between cinema and literature is not limited to adaptations of novels. Books by filmmakers, critics, historians, and researchers have preserved part of cinema's history.

In Lyon, I could see this relationship taking shape. A spectator might attend a discussion about a film's making or a director's life, buy a related book, and then speak with its author.

In such an environment, a book was not simply an object for sale. It could extend the film-watching experience.

Book-signing sessions also reduced the usual distance between authors and readers. Someone who might have spent years researching a film or a historical period stood face to face with a reader bringing their own questions.

A signature, in that context, was more than a name written on the opening page. It was an opportunity for a brief conversation, and sometimes the beginning of a new interest.

One of the sessions I attended was devoted to “Il était une fois…”. Taxi Driver, written by Delphine Valloire and published by Rockyrama. For me, it showed how the festival could transform a familiar film into a subject of renewed discussion and study.

The session devoted to fifty years of cinephilia through video, featuring Jérôme Wybon, Philippe Rouyer, Nathalie Chifflet, and André Bonzel, felt even more personal.

The discussion of video history, the possibility of watching films repeatedly, and the development of a culture of home cinephilia took me back to the years when watching films was often a collective family experience.

In Iran, watching films on video sometimes involved restrictions and difficulties that made the experience of cinephilia quite different from what was happening in other countries.

Sometimes thirty or forty relatives would gather around a television to watch a film. The video recorder, the tapes, and even the difficulties of obtaining them became part of the cinematic memories of a generation whose experience was very different from watching films on a mobile phone today.

In those moments, I felt that film history was not only the history of the films that had been made. It was also the history of how people found those films.

I also bought Vidéo, vidéos!, a keepsake from a session that connected technology's history with my own memories.

Meeting Philippe Rouyer, a critic and writer associated with the magazine Positif, was another valuable experience. His knowledge and way of discussing cinema were deeply instructive, prompting me to think more seriously about critics' role in transmitting film history.

I understood the importance of such programmes particularly well when I reflected on my own experience of writing criticism.

When writing about a film, I sometimes need to watch it several times, study its historical period, read interviews with its director, and test my own interpretations against more precise information.

The more I read about cinema, the more I realize that watching a film isn't the end of the experience. It can be the beginning of a long investigation.

Perhaps that is why I began my journey with a backpack and returned with a suitcase full of books and boxes of film posters.

These books are not merely souvenirs of the festival. Each reminds me of a conversation, a session, or a subject I want to explore further.

From this perspective, Festival Lumière does not simply exhibit cinema’s past. It creates the conditions to reread, examine, and interpret that past.

Day Three: An Accident in the Courtyard of the Institut Lumière

On the third day of the festival, something entirely unexpected happened—an incident that transformed my professional curiosity about Thierry Frémaux into a serious determination to learn about his life.

That day, October 12, I had gone to the Institut Lumière. I visited different parts of the institute, bought books and posters, and continued following the festival programme with the same enthusiasm I had felt from the beginning.

But in the courtyard of the Institut Lumière, I suddenly fell, and fell hard.

The impact was severe enough to injure my knee, ankle, and palm, and I felt intense pain.

My first thought was: what terrible luck! Now I would have to think about an emergency department and X-rays, and would probably spend the rest of the day resting at the hostel.

The possibility of missing festival events was almost as distressing as the pain itself.

I became so preoccupied with that thought that the pain gradually seemed to diminish—or perhaps my determination to continue made me less aware of it for a while.

Years of working in emergency medicine had taught me to remain as calm as possible in unexpected situations.

Several people immediately came to help.

Two women stayed beside me: one was a festival attendee, and the other a member of the Lumière staff. I will never forget their kindness. I asked one of them to bring me some ice. A young man also hurried over from the cinema area and returned from the bar with a bag full of ice.

Everyone was so attentive and kind that I was genuinely surprised.

Yet amid all the pain and concern, I kept looking at the film posters I had been carrying! I was worried they might have been damaged.

A little later, I realized that the posters and my water bottle had probably absorbed some of the impact of my fall. I thought that without them, I might have suffered a more serious injury.

I sat there, placed the ice from one of the posters inside the plastic wrapping, and wrapped it around my legs. I took painkillers and, despite everyone’s willingness to take me to the hospital or back to the hostel, decided to continue with the festival programme.

I didn't want to lose a single day.

It was at precisely that moment that Thierry Frémaux arrived.

Seeing my condition, he looked surprised and concerned, and asked why no one had called emergency services.

I calmly replied that there was no need to worry; I was a doctor myself.

He looked at me, then at my legs wrapped in bags of ice, and said with a mixture of kindness and humour:

“Oh, so that’s why you’re sitting here so relaxed—because you’re a doctor!”

It was a brief exchange, perhaps lasting only a few moments.

For him, it was probably one of the unexpected incidents of a busy festival day. For me, however, it acquired another meaning.

I had already learned a great deal from listening to him speak about cinema, from his extensive knowledge, and from the way he introduced films to audiences.

But that day, in the courtyard of the Institut Lumière, I encountered another aspect of his personality: a spontaneous, unpretentious human concern accompanied by humour.

Of course, a brief encounter is not enough to understand a person fully. But sometimes a few moments can motivate you to learn more.

Despite the pain, I continued attending festival events that day.

I went to a screening of Jules Dassin’s Jamais le dimanche (Never on Sunday), which Costa-Gavras attended.

The following day, I returned to the Institut Lumière to watch Gustav Machatý’s 1929 silent film Erotikon, accompanied by live piano music performed by Fred Escoffier. Later that afternoon, I attended the programme devoted to Costa-Gavras’s cinema at Pathé Bellecour.

But alongside the films, a new question had begun to form in my mind.

There and then, I decided to read about Thierry Frémaux.

And when I began my research and discovered that he had studied history before becoming deeply involved in cinema management, my curiosity grew.

How had a student interested in history and film criticism moved from voluntary work at a cultural institution to the position he holds in the cinema world today?

To find an answer, I had to go back many years before Cannes—to a suburb of Lyon, a film magazine, a young student, and an encounter with a filmmaker named Bertrand Tavernier.

A Young Man from Les Minguettes

Before His Name Became Associated with Cannes

Thierry Frémaux was born on May 29, 1960, and grew up in Les Minguettes, in Vénissieux, on the outskirts of Lyon—a predominantly working-class area that would later undergo considerable social and economic change.

So his birthday falls during the Cannes Film Festival every year. I must remember to wish him a happy birthday next time.

In a portrait published in Le Monde in February 2014, Vanessa Schneider presented an image of Frémaux that differed from the official public figure associated with Cannes: a man who remained attached to memories of his childhood neighbourhood, sport, football, and judo, and who did not see his life as disconnected from that environment.

This background matters in understanding him—not because birthplace or childhood circumstances explain professional success, but because it shows his path into cinema did not initially follow the conventional route of studying at a specialist film school and then entering the film industry.

Frémaux studied history at Université Lyon 2, where his academic research focused on the early years of the film magazine Positif.

Founded in Lyon in 1952, Positif became, alongside Cahiers du cinéma, one of France’s significant film criticism publications.

I find this particularly interesting.

Before becoming responsible for selecting films for one of the world’s major festivals, Frémaux had already immersed himself in historiography, study, and critical discussion of cinema.

Film magazines are not simply places where reviews are published. They are part of cinema's intellectual history—places where tastes are formed, disagreements recorded, filmmakers discovered or criticized, and new ways of understanding films developed.

For me, now that I'm publishing my own cinema magazine, this aspect of Frémaux’s life is particularly significant.

I wondered whether studying the history of a film magazine later influenced his approach to cultural management and programming.

Could there be a connection between an interest in the history of film criticism and a commitment to transmitting cinematic heritage to new generations?

Biography alone cannot answer such questions, but they seem to me a valuable starting point for exploring his intellectual world.

During his youth, Frémaux also worked at the independent radio station Radio Canut, where he spoke about cinema.

Alongside these activities, judo was an important part of his life—an interest that would later find expression in his book Judoka.

This combination of history, radio, sport, and cinema presents a different image of today’s busy Cannes director: a portrait of the years when cinema was, for him, not yet an institutional responsibility, but a subject of conversation, study, and personal passion.

June 1982: The Day His Life Changed Direction

In June 1982, Thierry Frémaux was 22.

At the time, the Institut Lumière was taking shape in Lyon, and Bertrand Tavernier, the renowned French filmmaker, attended a meeting to introduce the institution.

Frémaux, researching the early years of Positif, attended the meeting and spoke with Tavernier about his connection to the magazine.

He later wrote that his university research had, to some extent, provided an excuse to approach a filmmaker he admired.

During that encounter, he offered to work voluntarily with the Institut Lumière.

Tavernier welcomed his offer.

In a tribute written after Tavernier died in 2021 and published on the official Cannes Film Festival website, Frémaux recalled Tavernier’s response in words to this effect:

“We’re very much on our own. Welcome!”

But something else important happened that day.

Frémaux saw La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory), a short film from 1895 shot on the very historic site where he was standing.

Watching moving images from the past near where they were originally recorded became a profound, moving experience for him.

In his tribute to Tavernier, he wrote that from that moment onward, he had never really left the street of the first film—a phrase referring not only to a geographical location but to his enduring professional relationship with the Institut Lumière.

This part of Frémaux’s life interested me more than many of his later achievements.

A young man who had not yet established a professional position in cinema took advantage of a meeting, spoke with a filmmaker he admired, and offered to contribute without pay to the development of a cultural institution.

Of course, this story should not be turned into a simplistic legend of individual success.

Frémaux lived in a culturally rich environment, with a longstanding tradition of cinephilia and influential figures such as Tavernier and Bernard Chardère. These circumstances helped create opportunities for him.

At the same time, such opportunities do not necessarily become a forty-year professional journey without commitment, perseverance, the ability to collaborate, and a willingness to accept responsibility.

For me, this encounter illustrates the intersection of individual passion and cultural opportunity.

At this point, I realized that to understand Thierry Frémaux, I also needed to understand Bertrand Tavernier.

Bertrand Tavernier:

Cinema as a Way of Life

Bertrand Tavernier, born in Lyon in 1941 and deceased in March 2021, was an important French filmmaker of his generation.

He was a director, screenwriter, critic, writer, and passionate researcher of film history—someone for whom understanding cinema was not a secondary activity but an inseparable part of his professional and personal life.

Before making his first feature film, he was already active in film criticism and other cinematic work.

He released his debut feature, L’Horloger de Saint-Paul (The Clockmaker of St. Paul), in 1974. Starring Philippe Noiret, it explores the father-son relationship and questions of moral responsibility.

Over the following decades, Tavernier made films of remarkably different subjects and styles.

In Que la fête commence (Let Joy Reign Supreme), he returned to French history. In Coup de torchon, adapted from a novel by Jim Thompson, he explored violence and colonial relationships through dark humour.

Un dimanche à la campagne (A Sunday in the Country) examined family relationships, memory, and the passage of time. At the same time, Round Midnight portrayed the world of jazz and a musician's life.

In La Vie et rien d’autre (Life and Nothing But) and Capitaine Conan (Captain Conan), the history of war and its human consequences occupied the centre of the narrative.

But Tavernier was not simply a filmmaker who made films about history. Film history itself was central to his life.

He had a deep interest in classic American cinema, researched filmmakers and screenwriters, and devoted considerable effort to introducing lesser-known works.

50 ans de cinéma américain, written with Jean-Pierre Coursodon, is an important example of his contribution to film historiography. In Amis américains, he gathered conversations and memories relating to American filmmakers.

One of the most revealing works for understanding Tavernier’s approach to film history may be his 2016 documentary Voyage à travers le cinéma français (My Journey Through French Cinema).

In this documentary, he recounts French cinema's history through his own memories, discoveries, and passions.

He returns to films that shaped his perspective and discusses directors, actors, composers, and artists, some of whom conventional accounts of film history have given relatively little attention to.

This approach matters to me because film history is not simply a collection of dates, names, and awards.

It continues through the experiences of those who watch films, write about them, and refuse to allow them to be forgotten.

Tavernier served as president of the Institut Lumière from its beginnings and remained associated with the institution until his death.

Over the years, Frémaux moved from voluntary work into formal positions of responsibility.

He began working voluntarily with the institute in 1982 and later joined its staff.

In his tribute to Bertrand Tavernier, Frémaux wrote that he became director of the Institut Lumière in 1990.

In 1995, he also took on artistic direction alongside Tavernier, who was president of the institute.

During this period, they collaborated on events marking cinema's centenary, restoring the Lumière brothers’ films, and expanding the institute’s cultural and publishing activities.

The journey was not without difficulties.

Accounts of Frémaux’s early years describe doubts about entrusting him with responsibility, as well as the support Tavernier gave him.

Cinematic knowledge alone is not enough to build a cultural institution.

Trust from others, the ability to collaborate, an understanding of audiences, perseverance, and a willingness to take responsibility are equally important.

During the festival, as I listened to Frémaux introduce films, I sometimes imagined that behind his extraordinary knowledge and enthusiasm lay decades of watching films, studying, and talking with people who were themselves part of cinema history.

For me, the relationship between Tavernier and Frémaux became an example of how individual knowledge and passion can develop into institutional cultural activity. This process began with an encounter and took shape over decades.

Why This Story Became Personal

As I continued reading about Frémaux, I realized that part of his story's appeal lay in its connection to a path I had begun myself.

On a much smaller scale, I, too, am trying to create a cultural space centred on cinema: a small screening room, a magazine for film criticism and essays, discussion gatherings, and the hope that one day I might organize a film festival of my own.

For now, much of this work depends on my own time, effort, and passion. I still do not know what the future holds for these projects.

Perhaps that is why reading about a young man who once entered the Institut Lumière as a volunteer came to mean more to me than studying the biography of a successful cultural director.

Of course, the paths of two people cannot simply be equated.

Historical circumstances, France’s cultural resources, the support of figures such as Tavernier, and the Institut Lumière's institutional structure all shaped Frémaux’s development.

I want to understand how to sustain a passion for cinema over many years, deepen one’s knowledge, bring others together, and turn small initiatives into lasting cultural work.

These questions are entirely practical for me.

Establishing a small cinema space, publishing a magazine, and organizing screenings—even on a limited scale—require time, energy, financial resources, and collaboration.

Sometimes the distance between what we would like to accomplish and what is practically possible seems enormous.

For this reason, studying Frémaux’s path is not merely an exercise in examining the success of a well-known figure.

I want to know how he learned in his early years, how he assumed responsibility, and who helped him along the way.

Perhaps the answers cannot be found in books alone. But studying the lives of those who have travelled such paths before us can offer a clearer perspective on the difficulties and possibilities ahead.

When an Old Film Comes Back to Life

One of Festival Lumière’s defining features is the screening of classic films under conditions that allow contemporary audiences to experience them differently.

During the festival, the screening of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), accompanied by the Orchestre national de Lyon, was unforgettable for me.

The performance took place on October 15 at the Auditorium de Lyon.

A film made nearly a century ago appeared on a large screen accompanied by live orchestral music.

In such a performance, music is not merely an accompaniment to the image; it becomes part of the cinematic experience itself.

The rhythm of the images, the movement of crowds, the monumental architecture of the futuristic city, and the tension between human beings and machines acquire new meaning through the presence of the orchestra.

At the end of the performance, the audience’s prolonged applause, lasting approximately seven minutes, demonstrated how emotionally powerful and immediate an encounter with a historical work can still be.

For me, having seen Metropolis before, this screening was a reminder of the difference between knowing a film and experiencing it again under different circumstances.

The screening of Erotikon with live piano accompaniment offered another example.

The presence of the musician in the auditorium created a direct relationship between image and music. Every movement, pause, and shift in the film’s rhythm could be accompanied musically in the very moment it occurred.

These performances reminded me that cinema history is not preserved only in negatives, digital copies, and research books. The ways in which films are exhibited are also part of that history.

Recovering image and sound quality is important, but the way a film is presented can shape how audiences receive it.

At Festival Lumière, such screenings gave films the opportunity to become part of the collective life of audiences once again.

From Claude Lelouch to Costa-Gavras:

Film History in the Presence of Its Creators

Another distinctive feature of Festival Lumière was the presence of filmmakers whose works have become part of cinema history.

At a screening of Claude Lelouch’s Un homme et une femme (A Man and a Woman), I had the opportunity to see the director himself before the film and listen to his conversation with the audience.

Lelouch spoke about the early years of his career and the difficulties he had faced before the success of this film.

He was only twenty-six when he made A Man and a Woman, and he spoke about his earlier films with humour and candour.

Hearing a filmmaker recount his professional past immediately before watching a film made sixty years earlier connected the work to its creator’s personal history.

The presence of Costa-Gavras was equally significant to me.

Over several decades, his films have engaged with political history, power, repression, and individual responsibility.

In the documentary series devoted to his cinema, the political history of the twentieth century was revisited through his films.

For me, encountering such a filmmaker was more than meeting a celebrated name.

Watching his work alongside accounts of his professional journey reminded me of cinema’s complex relationship with power, history, and memory.

What mattered most was not simply the titles of the films or the reputations of the guests.

Hearing filmmakers, critics, and researchers speak alongside the screening of works made it possible to experience film history not merely as dates recorded in books, but as the result of the lives and choices of real human beings.

Two Different Worlds:

Lyon and Cannes

Thierry Frémaux joined the Cannes Film Festival as artistic delegate (Délégué artistique) in October 2000, and in 2007 assumed the position of General Delegate (Délégué général).

At first glance, Cannes and Lumière appear to inhabit two different worlds.

One is a major showcase for contemporary world cinema, where filmmakers present their works for the first time to critics, buyers, distributors, and international audiences.

The other is a festival whose identity is largely built around revisiting, restoring, and understanding cinema history.

But perhaps a deeper connection exists between these two activities.

At Cannes, the selection of films can influence filmmakers’ professional futures and the place of their work within international cinematic discourse.

At Lumière, the selection and presentation of films can influence the way cinema’s past is remembered.

In both cases, selection is central.

Which films are seen? Which films receive attention? Which works are given the opportunity to appear on the big screen? And which films, despite their possible merits, remain outside the programme?

These questions demonstrate that artistic festival direction is not merely an administrative activity. It is a form of cultural judgement, aesthetic preference, and institutional power.

For this reason, any serious understanding of Thierry Frémaux must also consider the criticism directed at Cannes’s selection policies.

Over the years, debates have addressed the representation of women filmmakers in Competition, the festival’s relationship with major studios, the place of independent cinema, and the influence of management decisions on the visibility of films.

In interviews, Frémaux has defended the importance of theatrical exhibition, artistic selection, and the preservation of the festival’s identity.

But examining these positions requires placing his statements alongside independent criticism and historical evidence.

The Grand Hôtel-Dieu:

Eight Centuries in the Life of a Building

Alongside my interest in Frémaux’s professional journey, my curiosity about the building in which part of the festival was taking place continued to grow.

The history of the Grand Hôtel-Dieu dates back to the late twelfth century, when a refuge for the sick, the poor, travellers, and pilgrims emerged near the Rhône.

In those days, a hospital was not simply a place for medical treatment. It was a shelter offering food, accommodation, care, and companionship to people in need, including those approaching the end of their lives.

Over the centuries, this small refuge expanded into one of Lyon’s important medical institutions.

François Rabelais, the Renaissance physician and writer, practised medicine at this hospital in the sixteenth century.

For me, the presence of Rabelais in the building’s history was fascinating: a physician now remembered far more for his literary work than for his medical practice.

It was as though medicine and literature had already met within these walls centuries earlier.

Perhaps Rabelais’s presence raises another question: can human beings be understood through science alone, or can art reveal dimensions of human experience that scientific language cannot fully express?

During the seventeenth century, large hospital wards, corridors, and a Baroque chapel were added to the complex.

In the eighteenth century, the French architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot contributed to the creation of the hospital’s imposing façade and distinctive dome overlooking the Rhône.

Soufflot’s great dome has itself had a turbulent history. This part of the building was damaged by fire in 1944 and subsequently reconstructed—an example of how the restoration of a building can itself become a new chapter in its architectural history.

The Grand Hôtel-Dieu has witnessed the French Revolution, wars, medical advances, and major social transformations.

Yet for generations of Lyon residents, the building was more than an architectural monument. It was part of their personal and family histories.

Children were born here. Patients were treated. Doctors and nurses spent long nights trying to save lives. Families waited for hours for news of their loved ones.

Perhaps someone attending a cinema conference in the building today was born here, or has a family member who was.

For someone who has spent many years working in hospitals, imagining this building’s past is not difficult.

I can mentally reconstruct the hurried footsteps of staff, the anxiety of patients’ relatives, the first cries of newborn babies, and the silence that follows death.

These are parts of hospital life that are rarely recorded in architectural drawings or restoration documents.

Among the chapters of this hospital’s history, its connection with the Lumière brothers became particularly important to me.

Auguste Lumière, one of the two brothers whose names are inseparable from the birth of cinema, was responsible for the radiology department at the Hôtel-Dieu during the First World War.

According to documents in the Lyon municipal archives, between 1914 and 1918 he developed approximately eighteen thousand radiographic images without charge and participated in medical work related to the care of wounded soldiers.

In the same city where the Lumière brothers transformed the history of moving images with their Cinématographe, one of them used imaging technology to understand the human body and assist in treating the wounded.

For me, this connection was more than an interesting historical coincidence.

I spent years working in emergency departments, and I know how a medical image can reveal something the human eye cannot see.

Sometimes a single X-ray changes a physician’s decision and even a patient’s fate.

In cinema, too, an image is more than a superficial record of reality.

Every frame can preserve part of an individual or collective memory—a memory that sometimes survives for future generations only because the image itself has been preserved.

The Hôtel-Dieu finally ceased its medical activities in 2010.

A major restoration and redevelopment project followed, and the complex reopened to the city in 2018.

Part of the site became the InterContinental Lyon – Hôtel-Dieu hotel, with interiors designed by Jean-Philippe Nuel, who sought to establish a relationship between the building’s historic structure and contemporary needs.

Today, restaurants, shops, a hotel, public spaces, and cultural activities occupy the complex.

Of course, such a major change of use also raises a question: when a place originally created to care for the sick and the poor becomes a luxurious commercial and hotel complex, what remains of its social memory?

This question cannot be answered simply by admiring the beauty of its architecture.

During the eighteenth edition of Festival Lumière, the festival village moved into the Cité de la Métropole de Lyon space within the historic Grand Hôtel-Dieu complex.

Corridors once traversed by patients and hospital staff are now used by filmmakers, critics, researchers, archivists, and cinema enthusiasts.

In spaces once filled with the footsteps of nurses, conversations between doctors, and the anxious waiting of patients’ families, one now hears discussions about films, cinema history, books, restored editions, and the future of cinematic heritage.

For me, this transformation is not simply the replacement of one activity with another.

It is as though a building that hosted life, birth, illness, and death for centuries is now breathing again through culture and cinema—without necessarily erasing the memory of its previous life.

From Images of the Body to the Memory of Images

More than a century ago, Auguste Lumière worked in this hospital with radiographic images and the treatment of injured human bodies.

Today, within the same historic complex, film restoration specialists gather to rescue damaged images, recover forgotten films, and return them to cinema screens.

In the past, images helped us understand and treat the body. Today, images themselves have become objects of care and preservation.

Of course, restoring a film and restoring a building are not technically or materially identical.

Architectural restoration deals with materials, structures, spaces, and uses.

Film restoration deals with negatives, sound, colour, framing, projection speed, and decisions that may alter the visual and auditory experience of a work.

Yet both confront a shared question: how can something marked by time be preserved while allowing it to continue living?

Today, the Grand Hôtel-Dieu offers an architectural response to that question.

In cinema, institutions such as the Institut Lumière, cinematheques, archives, and film heritage foundations work towards answering a similar challenge.

Restoration, by itself, does not guarantee that the past has been preserved faithfully.

In architecture, a building may be beautifully restored while its new function pushes aspects of its social memory into the background.

In cinema, a film may be reconstructed using advanced digital technology, while decisions about colour, sound, or framing produce an experience different from that of its historical version.

Restoration, therefore, is not merely a technical activity. It is a form of decision-making about the relationship between past and present.

In the history of architectural heritage preservation in France, figures such as Prosper Mérimée and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc are associated with the development of restoration theory and practice.

In film history, Henri Langlois and his colleagues, through the founding of the Cinémathèque française in 1936, played an important role in collecting and protecting cinematic works.

But preserving a film involves more than keeping copies of it.

To understand a work, we may also need posters, photographs, production documents, correspondence, and information that illuminates the historical circumstances of its creation.

It was at this point that the presence of two other Festival Lumière guests, Sophie and Jérôme Seydoux, acquired particular meaning for me.

Sophie and Jérôme Seydoux: From the History of Pathé to the Restoration of Cinematic Memory

On October 16, at Pathé Bellecour, I attended an event featuring Sophie and Jérôme Seydoux, two figures whose work is connected to the history of Pathé, one of the oldest companies in world cinema.

Jérôme Seydoux, chairman of the Pathé group, and Sophie Seydoux, president of the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, were guests of honour at the International Classic Film Market.

For me, however, their significance extended beyond their professional positions in the film industry.

What interested me was the relationship between their activities, cinema history, the preservation of works, and the possibility of screening old films again.

Pathé’s history dates back to 1896, when Charles Pathé and his brothers began developing a company that would gradually become one of the influential names in film production, distribution, and exhibition.

The significance of this history becomes clearer when we remember that the Lumière brothers’ first public Cinématographe screening in Paris took place in December 1895, only a year earlier.

Pathé emerged almost simultaneously with cinema’s development as a public and commercial medium.

During the early decades of the twentieth century, the company played an important role in expanding industrial film production, developing distribution and exhibition networks, and bringing films to audiences in different countries.

Charles Pathé was among those who understood that cinema’s future depended on more than the invention of a projection device or the production of films.

For cinema to expand, it needed a structure capable of producing films, circulating them, and bringing them to spectators.

Thus, while the Lumière brothers were introducing the possibility of recording and projecting moving images, Pathé was helping to establish cinema’s industrial and commercial foundations.

Today, the Pathé group remains active in film production, distribution, and exhibition, operating a network of cinemas.

Alongside these activities, the preservation of cinematic heritage also occupies an important place in its work.

The Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé was established in 2006, with Sophie Seydoux assuming its presidency.

The foundation preserves an extensive collection of documents and objects relating to Pathé’s history, including posters, production photographs, screenplays, production records, correspondence, equipment, and artefacts that document cinema’s past.

The importance of such a collection lies not only in the historical value of its objects.

When we speak of restoring a film, we usually think first of image quality, the removal of damage from negatives, or sound reconstruction.

But a film’s memory is not preserved solely in its moving images.

Sometimes a poster, a behind-the-scenes photograph, an early sketch, a director’s note, or a production document can reveal information about the circumstances of a film’s creation that cannot be seen in the film itself.

These documents allow researchers to reconstruct a work’s history more accurately, from artistic decisions to production conditions, advertising strategies, and the way audiences encountered it upon its original release.

In an interview published during the festival, Sophie Seydoux emphasised the importance of transmitting cultural heritage to future generations.

She explained that she did not see the foundation merely as a place for storing objects; its work continues through research, screenings, and restoration projects.

From this perspective, preserving cinema history means safeguarding a collection of works and documents that together make it possible to understand the past.

Film restoration also occupies an important place in Pathé’s activities.

Over the years, the company and its associated foundation have participated in the restoration and renewed presentation of works from French cinema history.

One important example is the restoration of Abel Gance’s La Roue (1923).

This silent film, significant for its narrative structure, editing, and visual experimentation, underwent an extensive restoration project.

The reconstructed version was screened at Festival Lumière in 2019 with musical accompaniment.

Projects of this kind demonstrate that restoring a historical film involves more than recovering image quality.

Sometimes scattered versions must be examined, historical documents studied, and decisions made about the length, sequence of scenes, and presentation of the work.

Here, the role of foundations, archives, and cultural institutions becomes crucial, because film preservation requires financial resources, specialist knowledge, and cooperation between different collections.

But Sophie and Jérôme Seydoux’s activities are not limited to the past.

Through his professional work, Jérôme Seydoux remains involved in film production, exhibition, and the future of cinemas.

At a time when watching films on personal screens and digital platforms has become part of everyday life, the continued existence of the cinema auditorium has acquired renewed importance.

For me, these two areas—the preservation of historical works and the preservation of collective film viewing—cannot be separated.

The restoration of a film becomes a cultural experience when the possibility of screening and watching it again is created.

A film restored through years of research and considerable expense may remain confined to an archive if it cannot reach cinemas, festivals, and new audiences.

This is where the roles of institutions such as Pathé and festivals such as Lumière become clear.

One can contribute to preserving and circulating films, while the other can create the conditions for audiences to encounter them again.

The presence of Sophie and Jérôme Seydoux at Festival Lumière, alongside filmmakers, critics, researchers, and restoration specialists, brought me once again to the role of Thierry Frémaux.

What I observed in Lyon was not simply Frémaux’s personal knowledge of films.

The festival he helps lead creates opportunities for different parts of the cinema world to meet—from those who make films to those who preserve them, write about them, or make their renewed exhibition possible.

Perhaps this ability to connect people and institutions, alongside his knowledge of film history, is one of the important dimensions of his cultural work.

But while researching the Pathé Foundation, I encountered another subject whose connection with architecture particularly interested me.

Renzo Piano and the Pathé Foundation:

Architecture in the Service of Cinematic Memory

The building of the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé in Paris is itself an example of the relationship between architectural restoration and the preservation of cinema history.

Located on Avenue des Gobelins in Paris’s thirteenth arrondissement, the building was designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano.

The project was completed in 2014, when the foundation moved into its new premises.

What interested me about the design was the architect’s approach to the building’s past.

Rather than demolishing the entire structure and constructing something with no relationship to the history of the site, the historic façade of the previous building was preserved, and a contemporary structure was created behind it.

Beyond the old façade stands a curved, modern volume designed with a different architectural language and materials.

Rather than concealing the contrast between past and present, this juxtaposition makes the difference between the two periods visible.

The interior is dedicated to preserving historical documents and objects, research, exhibitions, and film screenings.

The foundation’s screening room is particularly important for silent film presentations accompanied by live music.

For someone who considers architecture part of human memory, this project offered another example of the question I had encountered at the Grand Hôtel-Dieu: how can the past be preserved without separating it from contemporary life?

In Lyon, a historic hospital was transformed through restoration into a space for cultural, social, and commercial activities.

In Paris, a building with a historic façade found a new life dedicated to the preservation of cinematic heritage.

These two buildings are not alike in their history, scale, or function.

The Grand Hôtel-Dieu has been connected to medicine and the social life of Lyon for more than eight centuries, while the Pathé Foundation building is a contemporary architectural project within the historic urban fabric of Paris.

Yet both demonstrate that restoration is not simply the reconstruction of an old form. It is a decision about the future of a heritage.

In Renzo Piano’s architecture, preserving the historic façade does not mean reconstructing the entire past.

The new part of the building speaks the architectural language of the present and does not conceal its difference from what remains.

This approach brings me back to the question of film restoration.

Should restoration aim to return a work to an imagined form of its past, or should it carefully preserve what remains, ensuring that any reconstruction is grounded in historical documents and research?

At the Grand Hôtel-Dieu, this responsibility concerns the social memory of a building that served for centuries as a place of treatment and care.

At the Pathé Foundation, it concerns cinema’s memory and the documents without which parts of the history of this art form might disappear forever.

This is why the presence of Sophie and Jérôme Seydoux at Festival Lumière mattered to me.

Alongside learning about Thierry Frémaux and the role of the Institut Lumière, I encountered an institution that carries another part of the responsibility for preserving cinema history.

If filmmakers create works and critics write about them, archives, foundations, and restoration specialists help ensure that future generations can continue to see those works.

And this is precisely where the architectural history of the Grand Hôtel-Dieu, Auguste Lumière’s medical work, Pathé’s history, and the preservation of cinematic heritage came together in my personal experience of Festival Lumière.

The Books and Intellectual World of Thierry Frémaux

My research into Frémaux also led me to his books.

One of them is Rue du Premier-Film, published by Stock in 2024, in which Frémaux returns to the Institut Lumière and his memories of the place.

The premise appeals to me: spending a night in a place to which so much of his professional life is connected, a return that creates an opportunity to reflect on time, memory, and cinema.

Sélection officielle, published in 2017, explores his experience of selecting films for the Cannes Film Festival.

Judoka, published in 2021, is devoted to his passion for and experience of judo, an aspect of his life less visible in his public image as director of Cannes.

But perhaps the most significant book for understanding his relationship with Bertrand Tavernier is Si nous avions su que nous l’aimions tant, nous l’aurions aimé davantage, published in 2022.

In it, Frémaux returns to his friendship and years of collaboration with Tavernier.

Each of these works can open a different window onto his life: film selection, sport, friendship, memory, and his relationship with cinema history.

Nevertheless, I am still at the beginning of reading these works.

I do not want to judge their full contents solely on the basis of publishers’ descriptions or short interviews.

To understand a writer seriously, one must read their work, just as understanding a filmmaker requires watching their films.

A Festival Between Memory and the Future

Seeing Irène Jacob, president of the Institut Lumière, was an experience that went beyond encountering a familiar face from cinema.

Her presence immediately brought back memories of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s cinema, particularly Three Colours: Red (1994).

It was as though Valentine, the character from that film, had returned to stand before us more than three decades later.

Through her performances in The Double Life of Véronique and Red, Jacob became part of the collective memory of European and world cinema.

Seeing her now as president of the Institut Lumière, an institution devoted to preserving and bringing cinema history to life, carried a special meaning for me.

Here was a woman who was herself part of cinema history, now occupying a position dedicated to honouring and transmitting that very history.

At the ceremony presenting the 2026 Lumière Award to Joel and Ethan Coen, I found myself reflecting once again on the festival’s relationship with film history.

Through the films they have made over several decades, the Coen brothers have helped shape the history of contemporary cinema.

Their presence at a ceremony celebrating their artistic careers was a reminder that film history does not belong exclusively to the silent era or to the classics of the first half of the twentieth century.

A film made today may become a historical work decades from now—one whose copies must be preserved, whose history must be researched, and which must be made available for renewed screenings.

This connection between past and future was visible throughout the festival.

From silent films accompanied by live music to the presence of contemporary filmmakers, from critics’ discussions and book signings to conversations about restoration and preservation, these programmes returned to a shared question:

How can cinema be kept alive for future generations?

Within this context, Thierry Frémaux’s role became increasingly significant to me.

As General Delegate of Cannes, he engages with contemporary cinema and new films.

In Lyon, alongside his colleagues, he contributes to introducing and preserving cinema history.

Of course, such work is not the achievement of one individual.

The Institut Lumière, the festival team, restoration specialists, archival institutions, cultural supporters, critics, publishers, and audiences all contribute to the event.

But Frémaux, as a figure who connects these different elements, became the subject of my curiosity and research.

Returning to the Beginning: What I Brought Home from Lyon

When I think back to the third day of the festival, I remember the faces of those who came to help me more vividly than the pain of the accident.

The two women who stayed beside me, the young man who brought ice, and those who were ready to take me to hospital.

At that moment, the festival was no longer simply a collection of films and events. It was a community of people who, despite the demands of their schedules, stopped to help someone who had been injured.

And among them, that brief encounter with Thierry Frémaux became the beginning of a new question.

Perhaps I would have researched him even if I had not fallen that day.

His cinematic knowledge and his way of introducing films had already caught my attention.

But that incident made my motivation more personal and more determined.

From an encounter lasting only a few moments, I found myself exploring the life of a man who had begun by researching the history of a film magazine, met Bertrand Tavernier, worked at the Institut Lumière, and eventually assumed responsibility for one of the world’s major film festivals.

Along the way, I encountered subjects that extended far beyond the life of one person: the history of film criticism, the importance of archives, the role of restoration in preserving works, the relationship between cinema and education, and the power of cultural institutions to shape collective memory.

What I have learned about Frémaux through his writings and interviews suggests that his passion for cinema has been connected to study, friendship, collaboration, and the creation of spaces in which others can participate.

There are still many films I need to watch, many books I need to read, and many conversations I want to examine carefully.

Perhaps the more I read, the more I will encounter aspects of his personality or decisions with which I disagree.

That, too, will be part of understanding him.

But I have decided not to wait until the research is complete.

I want to publish what I learn along the way in my magazine, gradually, with the same curiosity that drew me to the study of cinema years ago and still compels me, after watching a film, to read about it, reflect on it, and sometimes watch it again.

Festival Lumière 2026 began for me with a backpack and ended with a suitcase of books and boxes of film posters.

But what I brought home from Lyon was more than books and posters.

I brought back questions that remain with me.

How is cinema history written? Who preserves it? How is it transmitted from one generation to another? And what leads someone to devote so much of their life to introducing films that may have been made decades earlier?

At the beginning of my journey, Thierry Frémaux was, to me, one of the internationally recognised figures of the cinema world.

By the end, he had become the subject of a research project that I want to pursue with patience, precision, and independence.

Yet my experience of Lyon went beyond discovering a cultural figure.

For someone who spent more than twenty years of her professional life in medicine, particularly in emergency departments, and who now attends Festival Lumière as a film critic and journalist, this journey acquired a deeply personal meaning.

In the past, in hospitals, I confronted the human body, the fragility of life, and the effort to save it.

Today, in cinema, I encounter the image of the human being, human memory, and the effort to preserve human experience.

I am no longer here as a physician. I have come to write about cinema.

And how beautiful it is that a building with eight centuries of medical history has found a new life through cinema.

During the final days of the festival, as I walked through the corridors of the Grand Hôtel-Dieu, I thought about the building’s long history: the patients who had once been treated there, the doctors who had worked within its walls, Auguste Lumière and his radiographic images, and the films now returning to the screen through the efforts of restoration specialists.

At the same time, I thought about the Pathé Foundation building in Paris, where a historic façade remains beside Renzo Piano’s contemporary architecture, and where cinematic documents and artefacts are preserved for future generations.

Despite all their differences, these two buildings became, for me, two examples of the relationship between past and future.

One was once a place devoted to caring for the human body and now hosts cultural activities.

The other, while preserving part of its historic architecture, has become a place devoted to caring for cinema’s memory.

Perhaps restoration, in a deeper sense, is precisely this: not returning the past to a form that no longer exists, but creating the possibility for it to remain present in contemporary life.

Sometimes life, too, brings us back to places we thought we had left behind forever—but this time with another perspective, new questions, and a life we have rebuilt.