Samira AIT BOUIZERGAN LALIER

Since the 1980s, Samira Ait Bouizergan Lalier has shaped the French visual landscape with rare exigency. Her career began in the vibrant world of photographic press agencies, first at Tempsport, then at the prestigious Cosmos agency, where she rose through the ranks to become head of photographers. During these pivotal years, she learned to detect the power of a narrative through a single shot, managing major photo stories and refining her eye for visual storytelling.

In 2009, drawing on this expertise, she founded VISUELLES, an audiovisual agency where the union of art and technique became her signature. Under her direction, the agency produces unique content, combining communication strategy with cinematic aesthetics. An active member of the Les Filles de la Photo network since 2022, she is also committed to the recognition of women in photography and the transmission of expertise. Her career path, spanning from executive production to artistic direction, makes her a complete expert, capable of transforming a visual intention into a memorable work, driven by an enduring passion for the evocative power of the image.

Born out of a cinephile epiphany in 1989 opposite I married an alien, this project led by Marc Gauché explores 120 years of representations of alien women, from Méliès to the productions of 2024. Accompanied by director Patrick Foch and experts, he took advantage of this residency in Rocabella to transform a monumental investigation into “male gaze” into a documentary scenario that is both rigorous and accessible.

Here, the estate becomes a driving character: the project team imagines “artistic punctuations” where space creatures take over the architecture of the Riviera. Together, and in close collaboration with a committee of prestigious experts (including Éliane Viennot and Raphaëlle Moine), they dissect how science fiction cinema has built, through the Selenites or the Venusians, a hierarchical and essential vision of the sexes.

The challenge is to demonstrate that these extraterrestrial figures, between submission and eroticized threats, are the mirror of our own ambivalences in the face of female emancipation. Between the estate gardens and the Mediterranean blue, this residence makes it possible to structure a filmic story where theoretical analysis meets visual creation, making Rocabella the laboratory for a necessary reflection on alterity, desire and power relationships.