Séance de soutien à Noailles Debout ! | Dormir à Noailles depuis de Tuia Cherici

Editorial

Eight years ago, on November 5, 2018, buildings no. 63 and 65 on rue d’Aubagne in Marseille collapsed. Eight people lost their lives there: Marie-Emmanuelle, Simona, Ouloume, Taher, Julien, Fabien, Pape, and Cherif. The appeal trial over the collapse of the buildings on rue d’Aubagne began on November 2 and will run until December 19, 2026, at 21 rue Ahmed-Litim – 13003 Marseille. These trials are open to the public.

Dormir à Noailles depuis

by Tuia Cherici | 2025 | France | 44 min | French version – Italian subtitles

An animated documentary written by Tuia Cherici in collaboration with anthropologist Arianna Cecconi, co-produced by PRIMITIVI and L’ARBRE DES YEUX, with support from the Noailles Debout ! Association, FMSH (Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme), and Collectif « La Farce » Repas solidaires

An animated microcosm of dolls, puppets, liquids, glass, drawings, and sculptures, all manipulated by hand, gently draws us into exploring the dreams and sleep of a historic Marseille neighborhood. Noailles is now undergoing gentrification through the eviction of its most precarious residents, who tell us here about their nightmarish nights, their imagination, and their insomnia, profoundly affected by the trauma of substandard and unworthy housing.

“Since” first refers to November 5, 2018, the day two buildings on rue d’Aubagne, “in a state of grave and imminent danger,” collapsed after being left abandoned. Eight people died beneath the rubble, and this tragedy profoundly marked the population and Marseille’s socio-political history.

But this “since” also refers to the precise moment when everything changed in the unsanitary apartments of some residents: when the ceiling suddenly collapsed on their heads, or the floor gave way, when the cracks in the stairwell deepened… It was from that moment on that the film’s protagonists lost their sleep. Children unable to sleep alone in their rooms, fear at the slightest noise, antidepressants, recurring nightmares, sometimes the decision to leave the neighborhood altogether… The film explores the lasting effects that unworthy housing can have on trauma—in the body, the imagination, and the night.

Structured in seven chapters, it interweaves a collection of residents’ audio testimonies (accounts of insomnia, nightmares, obsessions, anger, a sense of injustice, and strategies of resistance…) with a polymorphic animation practice: frame-by-frame animation, sculpture and cartoons, object manipulation, grains, liquids, animated projections onto bodies… A handmade aesthetic, built brick by brick, like Noailles: inventive, multifaceted, and multicolored.

These voices, with their different accents, document the trauma caused by this disaster, help legitimize a collective mourning and suffering that are still struggling to be recognized, give form to grief and demands, and reveal the close interdependence between lived social experience while awake and nocturnal experience while asleep.

Dormir à Noailles depuis is part of a broader anthropological and artistic research project that the filmmaker has been pursuing with anthropologist Arianna Cecconi since 2013, exploring dreams and sleep. This particular approach brings to light the issues of inadequate housing, social discrimination, cultural differences, and cultural blending that run through Marseille society in its sleep.

Practical information

Join the Facebook event

Tickets go on sale 30 minutes before each screening.

Pay what you can in cash, in support of the Noailles Debout ! collective

Get your membership online