Marseille, a city with a dual identity, is seen both as the setting of Pagnol’s films and as a hub for powerful organized crime. Often labeled France’s crime capital, its contemporary history is marked by recurring violence and media portrayals that clash with political leaders’ responses. Jérôme Pierrat examines the roots of this violence, exploring two centuries of social and political challenges that have shaped the city.

January 6, 1980. President of the Sicily Piersanti Mattarella is going to Mass with his family when a young man approaches his car and shoots him in cold blood, killing him. The young Deputy Prosecutor on duty that day is Pietro Grasso, future General Anti-Mafia Prosecutor and President of the Italian Senate. His investigations are continued by Giovanni Falcone, who uncovers dangerous connections between the Mafia, the ruling Christian Democratic Party, neo-fascist terrorists, and secret services.

The St. Valentine's Day massacre is the stuff of American legend, and the tale is familiar to nearly everyone. But the story of that bloody day in Chicago has never been told, or seen, like this before. Cutting-edge graphics and frenetic recreations accompany Johnny Fratto, son of onetime Al Capone-associate Louis "Lew" Fratto, back to Chicago, where he uncovers massacre myths and learns more about the life his father and uncles led when they roamed those lawless streets in the 1920s. Johnny gets guidance and opinions from a team of renowned Chicago gangster experts, and bridges the gap between the stories he heard as a little boy and the reality he lived growing up in a mob family. Johnny's take about what happened on Feb. 14, 1929 will surprise you.

Valérie Jouve is a weel-known photographer, and Grand Littoral is her first film. Out the outskirts of Marseille, in a landscape criss-crossed by motorways, railways and srubland paths, some figures that seem to be from her famous photos passby and bump into each other. They act as our guides in a tour without beginning or end. How do you look at a place without taking possession of it? How do you describe characters without confining them within a given plot? How do you make the transition from still shots to moving pictures? this brief, musical film leaves us asking these and other unresolved questions.

A documentary focused on the proliferation of bedbugs in Marseille.

80 years ago, Marseille's Old Port was the scene of a tragic event that is still largely unknown today: the roundup and total destruction of the Saint-Jean district, on Hitler's own orders. "The Forgotten Round-up" draws on the memories of some of the last direct witnesses to the tragedy, and follows the investigation of Marseille lawyer Pascal Luongo, grandson of one of the victims.

A profile of New York's Gambino crime family examines the rise of its founder, Carlo Gambino, and that of his successors, Paul Castellano and John Gotti.

Visible from the sky scrapers of San Fransisco's financial district, Bayview is a deadly ghetto. Most of the young people here won't live to see their 25th birthday.  At the age of 12, Devin Melvin was already armed and dangerous, but at age of 16 he has traded his gun for a camera and documents life inside one of America's deadliest ghettos.  Prisoners of the Ghetto (2006) is a documentary TV-film by writer/director Walter Tauber.