Lea Carme

Léa Carme is a documentary filmmaker and camera operator, a graduate of the INA — Institut National de l'Audiovisuel in France. She conceives cinema as a space of encounter and resonance between plural sensibilities, making documentary film a place where voices, memories, and imaginaries converge.

Trained at the INA, she developed a strong technical and narrative command of documentary filmmaking, further enriched by experiences in Strasbourg, Montréal, and at the Université Paris 3, broadening her practice toward collective and open-ended creation. Her work is characterised by an empathetic and sensory approach, in which the image becomes a vehicle for collective resonance and poetic exploration of the real. Among her recent works, the short film Un air de fête (2024) — which she both directed and photographed — explores the memory of Jacques Tati's film Parade, weaving together archives, testimonies, and new images to create a dialogue between past and present.

Her films, including Plantes à l'œuvre and Les mondes de l'émail, bring multiple voices into dialogue — communities, individual memories, cultural heritages — in a resolutely humanist approach. Based in France, she collaborates with organisations such as Sancho et Compagnie and continues to develop projects that extend her vision of documentary cinema as a space of connection, at the crossroads of the intimate and the shared.

As part of the Les Gardiennes de la Mer artistic residency at Résidences Rocabella, Léa Carme turns her documentary gaze toward the Mediterranean landscape with the same attentiveness she brings to each of her films: a deep listening, a curiosity for buried memories, and a sensitivity to what connects people to one another and to their environment.

The sea — a space of flow and transmission — resonates directly with her artistic approach: just as she wove connections between Tati's archives and the present in Un air de fête, or revealed the invisible worlds of enamel and plants in her earlier works, she explores here what the Mediterranean coastline holds in terms of stories, voices, and living heritage. This residency offers her the space for a sensitive and collective documentary creation, in which the camera becomes, once again, an instrument of resonance — between people, places, and the memories that inhabit them.