Snippets of cinema
New Caledonian cinema is, on the scale of its territory, small. Local production remains marginal today, even if recent short films by young filmmakers are exported fairly well in the Pacific, under the impetus of festivals and screening tours in neighboring countries such as Australia and New Zealand. For example, the New Caledonian Film Festival recently featured eight short films in Kanak or French, shot by local filmmakers. In addition, the small screen has allowed the birth of the series O.P.J. Pacifique Sud, a very popular crime drama, shot mostly on the island. Its stars, Yaëlle Trulès and Marielle Karabeu, are very well known on the island, where the latter is originally from.
A paradise for documentary filmmakers
Although the number of international film shoots on the islands is quite limited, it should be noted that Caledonia has hosted several major figures of European cinema such as Mathieu Kassovitz, Kristin Scott Thomas or David Attenborough. That said, one of the first films shot on the island was perhaps Georges Péclet's L'espionne sera à Nouméa (1963), a film between espionage and tropical romance, of poor quality but which still has the merit of taking advantage of the island's beautiful scenery to set its scene. David Attenborough came to the island for his animal documentaries Life on Earth (1979), a classic of the genre, before Luc Besson followed him for the sequel to The Big Blue, Atlantis (1991). It was also during this period that Marie-France Pisier shot The Governor's Ball (1990), a bourgeois drama with a fifties feel that has not necessarily survived the times, but is still relatively worthy of interest. At the end of the 1990s, the critic and filmmaker Gilles Dagneau travels the country through six documentaries, spread over the ten years of his stay. With a curious eye, he immersed himself in the cultural and social heritage of the island, rediscovering its history and its figures such as the writer Jean Mariotti, the Kanak politician Jean-Marie Tjibaou, or the French gendarme and filmmaker Robert Citron, who filmed in the 1950s in New Caledonia, before Dagneau himself. On the small screen, some episodes of the comedy series H. were filmed in the territory.
Between two beaches, the rooms and screens of the island
Today, there is only one cinema left in Nouméa. While the screens of the Rex, the Hickson, the Plaza and the Liberty used to liven up the evenings of tourists and locals, it is now in the Cinecity complex that the island's film buffs are concentrated. A cinema which also has a drive-in, for the happiness of the amateurs of this deliciously retro activity. In La Foa, you can discover the latest releases in the Jean-Pierre Jeunet cinema, as well as an annual international film festival.
