Curiosity over consensus
We commission work that challenges the conversation, not work that flatters it. Our editors are paid to disagree with each other, and our writers are chosen for the questions they ask, not the answers they already hold.
About Tabous Le Film
A studio built on the slow art of looking closer.
We are editors, writers, and image-makers tracing the threads that connect cinema, culture, and the technologies reshaping how stories are told. This is where we share ours.
Our Story
Started in a borrowed editing bay, now reaching curious minds in forty-three countries.
Tabous Le Film began in 2017 as a small newsletter sent from a converted loft in Marseille — three friends writing about the films they couldn't stop thinking about. What started as a love letter to slow cinema quickly grew into something more deliberate: a publication, a production house, and eventually a year-round editorial studio.
Today our team of writers, cinematographers, and software engineers works at the intersection of three disciplines. We commission long-form criticism, produce original short documentaries, and build the digital tools that help film lovers keep discovering work that matters. We believe a film is never finished — it is re-read by every generation that encounters it — and our work is to make those re-readings a little easier.
"We wanted a place where the people who care deeply about cinema could meet the people building the future of how we watch it." — Léa Marchetti, Founding Editor
From a single quarterly zine to a multi-platform studio in eight years: we are still that loft, just with better lighting and a growing address book.
Mission & Values
What we hold, what we question, what we keep building toward.
Three principles guide every essay we commission, every short we produce, and every line of code we ship. They are deliberately simple — and deliberately hard to live up to.
Slowness as a discipline
A great film earns its runtime; a great review earns its length. We refuse the tyranny of the feed and publish on a rhythm that respects both our readers and the makers we cover — weekly essays, quarterly deep-dives, and one film per season.
Craft in every detail
From the typeface on the page to the codec on the stream, every decision passes a single test: does it serve the work? We treat our production pipeline, our reading experience, and our partnerships with the same seriousness we bring to the cinema itself.
Open by default
Our reading guides are free, our metadata is open, and our short documentaries are released under licenses that let educators, archives, and small festivals use them. Knowledge about cinema should not have a paywall.
A global conversation
Our contributors live in twenty-two cities, and we read submissions in eleven languages. We actively commission voices from film cultures the Anglophone press has historically overlooked — West Africa, Central Asia, the Pacific, and beyond.
Independent, always
We take no advertising from distributors or streamers, and our editorial board holds a binding firewall against our commercial work. When you read a Tabous review, you can trust that no one paid for that sentence.
By the numbers
Eight years, three disciplines, one careful audience.
A snapshot of the work — and the readers, writers, and makers that make it possible.
1,200+
Essays & reviews
43
Countries reading
22
Contributor cities
17
Original shorts produced
How we work
Four steps from an idea to a finished piece.
Our editorial process is the same whether the deliverable is a 4,000-word essay, a 12-minute short, or a metadata schema for a film archive.
STEP 01
Listen
Every project starts with conversations — with filmmakers, archivists, distributors, and the readers who write back. We spend the first weeks asking more than we answer.
STEP 02
Frame
A short, internally reviewed brief sets the question, the audience, and the format. We resist scope creep by writing the brief tight enough that a stranger could evaluate it.
STEP 03
Make
Writers draft, cinematographers shoot, engineers build — but always with a senior editor in the room. We share work early, when it is most fixable, and we share it often.
STEP 04
Release & learn
Every published piece is paired with a public post-mortem three months later. We share what worked, what flopped, and what we would change — and our readers help us interpret the data honestly.
The people
A small team, deliberately.
We are fourteen full-time staff and a network of more than ninety contributors. Here are a few of the voices that shape what we publish each week.
Léa Marchetti
Founding Editor
Former programmer at FIDMarseille. Léa oversees editorial direction and still personally commissions our long-form essays.
Daniel Asante
Head of Production
Documentary director whose short Saltwater Rooms premiered at Rotterdam. He leads our original film slate and on-location crews.