Pierre Lescure, president of the Cannes Film Festival, and Thierry Frémaux, its general delegate, are on the stage of a room at the UGC Normandie, in Paris, this Thursday, June 3. The traditional press conference will start, and the selected films will be announced. As a preamble, Lescure announces: “The city is ready, the new Cannes multiplex too. With Cineum, the two most beautiful screens in Europe will be available to festival-goers. “
Cineum is a huge iceberg with faceted walls, designed by architect Rudy Ricciotti in the peripheral district of Bocca, and which will open its doors on Tuesday, July 6. The cinema will host screenings of feature films in competition. But beyond the festival, this complex mainly fills a void.
An independent family group
This is because Cannes, the city that moviegoers all over the world know, at least in name, had so far only two cinemas. The Arcades and the Olympia. In all, twelve screens. Six years ago, the municipality (whose mayor, David Lisnard, left Les Républicains pour le Mouvement Libres !, by Valérie Pécresse) decided to remedy this shortcoming. It is launching a call for tenders for a new room.
The site chosen is a land reserve located between a Carrefour supermarket, the airport, a car dealership and an access road to the center … which will be part of the new audiovisual center “Cannes on air”, which will eventually have a university specializing in writing and a business incubator dedicated to image professions.
Faced with mastodons like Gaumont, it is the manager of the Arcades, Philippe Borys-Combret, who wins the call for tenders. His argument? Call on the architect Rudy Ricciotti (designer of the Mucem in Marseille, of the Islamic arts department at the Louvre, or of the Pont de la République in Montpellier) to offer a cinema with high added architectural value. “We worked on a strong signal at the entrance to the city”, remembers the operator, at the head of an independent family group founded in 1938. Ricciotti will imagine a very sculptural building, of an opaline whiteness.
“I was confronted with the question of the building’s autonomy. So I imagined a building with an abstract singularity, which fits into a context that does not bear a story. »Rudy Ricciotti, architect
“In a territory a little torn apart from urban growth, with hangars and buildings of all kinds, we could not graft onto the existing since we did not have the traditional framework of the city of the XIXe century, historical traces to which to relate ”, recalls the architect. “I was confronted with the question of the building’s autonomy. So I imagined a building with an abstract singularity, which fits into a context that does not bear a story. “
You have 59.84% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.