Vauban, Notre quartier
2026 · 2m
Directed by Noah Manakdjian
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
In Marseille's Vauban quarter, perched below Notre-Dame de la Garde, the long-time inhabitants recount their neighbourhood — its steep, colourful streets, stairs and climbs — to a young man discovering it, in a documentary steeped in nostalgia and love for their changing native village.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 2-minute love letter to a neighborhood is exactly the kind of earnest, consensus-friendly gesture that usually makes me roll my eyes — except Manakdjian seems aware enough of the form to earn the nostalgia rather than just trade in it, which is rare enough to notice.
The film positions itself in a lineage of essay cinema and Varda-influenced portraiture, where oral testimony and urban topography become a meditation on memory and place; the formal restraint — letting the inhabitants' voices and the architecture do the work — shows considerable curatorial judgment.
What lifts this beyond a pleasant neighborhood portrait is the decision to let the climb itself become the film's rhythm: each staircase and ascent echoes in the editing, turning geography into narrative structure without ever announcing it.