52′, directed by Jean-Christophe Besset.
Co-produced by France Télévisions.
With the support of CNC, PROCIREP, ANGOA and the PACA region.
Anyone who has never seen the neon forest of Plan-de-Campagne at night cannot understand the symbolic role that this commercial area plays in the collective imagination. Located between Marseille and Aix-en-Provence, it is the largest in France and the second largest in Europe.
Its history is an economic fairy tale and its creation a legend similar to that of Las Vegas, associated with the success of a business visionary: Emile Barnéoud. Plan-de-Campagne has become a kind of open-air fair, crystallizing the social problems caused by the changes in our society.
After 40 years of favourable treatment, it is forced to lower the iron curtain on Sundays. It is the end of a period that marked a whole generation…
Through a subtle mix of human adventures, we enter the world of mass consumption and the quest for happiness through the abundance of goods, symptomatic of our time, which prefigures, for the philosopher Gilles Lipovestsky, the “paradoxical happiness.