Can Emerging Cinema Still Change the Way We See? Chanel, Nouvelles Vagues, and the New Voices of Biarritz

I was invited by Chanel, 19 rue Cambon, to Biarritz for the Festival du Film Nouvelles Vagues (New Waves). And I have to state it clearly: I did not expect to be this impressed.

For its fourth edition, the festival already had the confidence of something much more established. It brought together renowned actors, filmmakers, cultural figures, and a selection of films of remarkable quality. But what struck me most was not only the prestige of the names present. It was the energy of the new voices.

The Festival du Film Nouvelles Vagues is dedicated to youth, and this could easily become a vague, fashionable word. But here, youth did not feel like a marketing theme. It felt like a point of view. A way of seeing. A way of refusing certain inherited forms and trying to invent others.

The young talents presented at the festival are not simply “emerging” in the polite sense of the word. They are already proposing something. They bring perspectives that move cinema forward, not because they reject everything that came before them, but because they dare to test new forms of expression, new tensions, new rhythms, and new ways of looking at the world.

A Festival Is Not Only About Showing Films

A film festival is often imagined as a glamorous sequence of screenings, red carpets, and names. But when it works, it is much more than that. It creates a context.

In Biarritz, I felt that. The festival was not simply presenting films one after another. It was building a space around them. A space where new filmmakers could be taken seriously, where the audience was invited to listen, to observe, and to enter worlds that may not yet have been fully validated by the market or by institutions.

And this is important. Because if we only look at what has already been recognized, we arrive too late. We miss the moment when creation is still fragile, still searching, still alive.

Before the New Image, There Was Memory

One of the details I loved most was the fact that each presentation I attended began with archives from the Institut national de l’audiovisuel.

This may seem like a small curatorial choice. It is not.

To begin with archives is to remind us that cinema never starts from zero. Every new image arrives after other images. Every new generation enters into a conversation that began before it. Even the most contemporary gesture carries traces of the past.

I found this extremely thoughtful, because it gave depth to the screenings. We were not thrown directly into the new. We were first placed inside a memory.

And this changed everything.

It reminded us that novelty without context is often superficial. But novelty placed in relation to history can become meaningful. The festival did not oppose youth and heritage. It allowed them to answer each other.

This is also why the name Nouvelles Vagues (New waves) works so well. A new wave is not only a rupture. It is also a movement. Something that rises from what came before, transforms it, and carries it elsewhere.

Chanel and the Art of Cinema

Chanel has maintained a long and deep relationship with cinema. Gabrielle Chanel understood very early that cinema was not just entertainment. It was an art of images, bodies, gestures, silhouettes, atmosphere, and memory. In the 1930s, she went to Hollywood to dress actresses. Later, the house became connected to figures such as Romy Schneider and Jeanne Moreau, women whose presence on screen was inseparable from style, intelligence, and aura.

But this relationship did not remain in the past.

Today, Chanel continues to support cinema through film production, costume creation and loans, the restoration of iconic works, partnerships with major institutions, and support for emerging talents. This matters because cinema is not preserved only by watching old films. It is preserved by restoring them, contextualizing them, transmitting them, and allowing new filmmakers to continue the conversation.

Fashion and Cinema: Shaping Images That Stay

Fashion and cinema both create images that remain. A costume, a silhouette, a gesture, a fabric, or a look can define a character before a word is spoken, and sometimes become part of a larger cultural memory.

This is why the dialogue between Chanel and cinema goes beyond red carpets or appearances: it belongs to the way images are made, remembered, and transmitted. In Biarritz, this connection felt especially meaningful - a festival looking toward the future of cinema, accompanied by a house with a long history of shaping visual culture.

Go Before Everyone Else Decides It Matters

In contemporary art, we are used to the idea of discovering emerging artists. We visit exhibitions, studios, art fairs, and galleries precisely because we want to see what is being created before it becomes obvious to everyone else.

But cinema is not always approached with the same openness.

Too often, we wait for films and filmmakers to be validated before paying attention to them. We wait for the awards, the reviews, the names, the international recognition. We wait until everyone agrees that something matters.

But by then, we have already missed something essential: the moment when a voice is still forming, when a language is still searching, when cinema is not yet a monument, but a movement.

This is what makes the Festival du Film Nouvelles Vagues so exciting. It invites us to arrive earlier. To look before consensus. To listen before recognition. To take emerging cinema seriously not because it has already been confirmed, but because it is alive.

Go to the Festival

Go to Biarritz next year. Go with curiosity, without intimidation, and without assuming that a film festival is not meant for you. Too often, we let preconceived ideas keep us away from cultural spaces we imagine as elitist, distant, or difficult to enter. But the only way to understand what a festival can offer is to experience it: to sit in the dark, let yourself be surprised, and discover voices, images, and stories you might not have encountered otherwise. Give it a try. Let the films surprise you.

If this article made you want to discover the Festival du Film Nouvelles Vagues, or simply to enter cultural spaces with more curiosity and less intimidation, share it around you. Someone else may need that invitation too :)