Deauville 202 : Vive le Cinéma: Deauville Photo Exhibition 2026

Just before the 52nd Deauville American Film Festival opens, the Galerie d’Art Un Rêve Éveillé is extending the city’s celebration of cinema into still photography. From September 3 to 13, 2026, Vive le Cinéma will bring together Kris DeWitte, Marcelo Nlele and Stéphane Kossmann, with artistic presentation by actor Eriq Ebouaney. The collective exhibition is independent from the festival but deliberately conceived in resonance with it, creating a parallel route through the gestures, faces and suspended moments that surround filmmaking. Its dates overlap almost completely with the official festival, which runs from September 4 to 13, turning Deauville into a meeting point for American cinema, audiences and image-makers.

Three photographers, three ways of looking at cinema

The exhibition’s central idea is simple but fertile: cinema does not exist only in the projected image. It also lives in the concentration before a take, the tension of a film set, the choreography of a photocall and the seconds on a red carpet when a public figure stops performing for the cameras. The press presentation describes Vive le Cinéma as a journey from sets to red carpets and major international festivals, focusing on waiting, fragility, fleeting gestures and moments that escape official representation. Eriq Ebouaney frames the three approaches as deliberately different yet complementary: together, they evoke what comes before a film, what accompanies it and what remains after it. Photography therefore becomes not simply promotional documentation, but an autonomous art form and a sensitive memory of cinema.

Kris DeWitte: searching for presence rather than pose

For Kris DeWitte, the decisive image is less about a perfectly controlled portrait than about presence. The exhibition material credits him with photographing more than a thousand cinema personalities and emphasizes his attention to a look, a tension or a gesture capable of restoring the atmosphere of a shoot. That approach is consistent with his established career as a film-set photographer. The Belgian Society of Cinematographers has documented his early fascination with cinema and image-making, while Cinema Galeries previously presented his work in the 2016 exhibition From Film to Photo, highlighting a career closely connected to film productions. In Deauville, his photographs should therefore operate like fragments of filmmaking itself: still images carrying the pressure and texture of movement around them.

Marcelo Nlele: finding spontaneity inside the protocol

Where film-set photography works close to production, Marcelo Nlele approaches cinema through its highly visible public rituals. According to the exhibition’s press material, he has covered major cinema events since the early 2000s, photographing stars, photocalls, red-carpet arrivals and behind-the-scenes moments. Yet the stated goal is not merely to record who attended. His eye searches for a smile, a shared glance or an expression that slips beyond protocol. That distinction is important in an environment where poses are repeated at speed for dozens of cameras: the anecdotal detail, rather than the official stance, can become the image that feels most truthful. Within Vive le Cinéma, his work forms a bridge between spectacle and the human reactions that survive inside it.

Stéphane Kossmann: the red carpet as photographic territory

For Stéphane Kossmann, the red carpet is not a barrier between photographer and subject but a territory in its own right. His official biography describes a practice built around the fractions of a second when stars release the pose and their carefully managed image briefly loosens. His long relationship with Deauville is particularly relevant: his 2020 book We Met in Deauville gathered a selection drawn from 25 years of work on the festival’s red carpet. That history gives his participation a special local resonance. Rather than treating the carpet only as a ceremonial passage, his photographs look for relaxation, energy, vulnerability and personality in a setting designed to be controlled.

An exhibition in dialogue with the 52nd Deauville American Film Festival

The timing gives Vive le Cinéma an unusually direct connection with the city around it. The official 52nd Deauville American Film Festival runs from September 4 to 13, 2026 and announces 80 films across nine categories. The 2026 jury is chaired by Roschdy Zem, with members Simon Abkarian, Camille Chamoux, Cécile de France, Euzhan Palcy, Raphaël Personnaz, Lola Quivoron, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr and Laura Smet. Against that busy programme of screenings, encounters and ceremonies, the gallery exhibition offers another scale of attention: viewers can stop on a single face or gesture rather than follow the forward motion of a film or festival schedule. It effectively turns the surrounding machinery of cinema into the subject.

Vive le Cinéma makes the margins of cinema its main stage

What gives Vive le Cinéma its identity is the decision to focus on cinema’s margins without treating them as secondary. A film set before action, the few seconds between red-carpet poses, a glance exchanged amid photographers or a moment of visible concentration can carry their own narrative. By bringing together Kris DeWitte, Marcelo Nlele and Stéphane Kossmann, the exhibition proposes three complementary archives of that in-between world. In a city where cinema will dominate the first half of September, the Galerie d’Art Un Rêve Éveillé offers visitors a chance to look at the medium from the side: not through the finished movie, but through the people, rituals and fleeting emotions that surround it.

Event recap

Where : Galerie d’Art Un Rêve Éveillé, 168 avenue de la République, 14800 Deauville
When : September 3–13, 2026
What : A collective photography exhibition by Kris DeWitte, Marcelo Nlele and Stéphane Kossmann, artistically presented by Eriq Ebouaney.

(Source : press release)