Naissance d’un musée – Le Louvre Lens

“Naissance d’un musée – Le Louvre Lens” is a unique experience of the cinematic gaze on the creation story of a new museum that’s inadequate in every way: geographically, historically, museographically and architecturally. The film follows the Louvre Lens story from site selection– in a region of old coal mines in northern France– to the first anniversary of its inauguration; an exhaustive cinema project, which explains the unusual length of this extraordinary visual document. The film also deals with recent delocalization operations involving cultural institutions in northern France’s Pas de Calais region, such as the Château et Musée de Versailles; and with other examples of the removal of major museums from their original sites, such as the Fondation Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Centre Pompidou in Metz and the Musée du Louvre at Abu Dhabi, in an attempt to understand the circumstances, the logic and the problems correlated to such choices.