"MEDIA HAVE A DUTY TO RECONNECT PEOPLE, SERVE DEVELOPMENT, DIVERSITY AND PEACE".

Contributing to positive media development

​Traditional film and media industries are under the influence of increasingly unsound industry logics. Their singular pursuit of profit, therefore of people’s attention at any cost has become detrimental to human development.

Media are controlled in every country, primarily by their owners. Media financed by advertising and brands treat people’s “available brain time” as the ultimate commodity. Instead of creating nurturing content, they tend to appeal to the lowest impulses of their audience with entertainment, giving a large share to fear-driven content, and to sustain people's illusory needs of more products.

Media operators and their circles of influence have been in denial of their negative impact on people and development over long periods of time on a large scale. Their “End of History” vision for media poses incredible threats to our future.

We have an opportunity to create positive media outlets and responsible media ecosystems under the umbrella of these cities whose purpose will be to reconnect us with life, to empower us as urban citizens, and to inspire us to take part in sustainable development.

Cities of Love Film Franchise

The vision for Cities of Love started with Paris, je t’aime, the first film of its kind celebrating love for cities through cinematic storytelling by an international artist community: 18 stories, 22 directors, 32 writers, 39 lead actors and numerous cinematographers and editors of world renown. Selected as the opening film of the 2006 Cannes International Film Festival Un Certain Regard section, this critically acclaimed and commercially successful film reached 58 countries and generated US$ 48 million in global revenues.

New York, I Love You formalized the Cities of Love feature Film Franchise, with our know-how consigned in an optimized production guideline and licensing agreement. It continued to attract top talents and nurture creativity from around the world for the city in focus. The film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival 2008. Its success directly led to the licensing of Rio, I Love You next and the building of a more comprehensive Cities of Love framework.

With Rio, I Love You, we pivoted our strategic approach. Three years before the film release, we first launched a media platform activating the Rio community around love for the city. It attracted 1.1 M active followers, 4 M visitors per month and 6 M video viewership by the locals. People contributed enthusiastically to the prosperity and sustainability of their city through community activation. The feature film was then financed with soft-money, thus proving the concept of a self-sustaining, replicable and scalable business platform for future Cities of Love endeavors. Our experience in Rio changed our model by opening new perspectives for social impact.

Berlin, I Love You is the latest installment of the Cities of Love franchise and was released gobally in 2019.

Cities of Love Online Platforms

Existing through numerous activations that we document in a beautiful way and share with millions of people, Cities of Love Online Platforms have the mission to spread love “in” and “for” cities. They are “strictly” positive media players in cities’ ecosystems doing good for cities, doing good for people, and doing more with less.

We work with all the creative forces of a city: developers, architects, designers, artists, photographers, filmmakers, bloggers can showcase the city with their best achievments and content, and we use media, contests, wide distribution and viewership as incentives. Story-telling can help feature neighbourhoods, communities, craftsmanship, achievements, unsung heroes, contributing celebrities, local unicity... with the goal to make people proud of their cities and to sustain hope locally for younger generations. Media can be very empowering. City, I Love You Platforms are also naturally creating synergies with each city’s cultural agenda (i.e. biennales, festivals, fashion week, music & cultural fairs, industry expos, world expo, world cup, olympic games, etc.).

Growing and growing, the community of the people who love a city soon becomes:

• An audience for a myriad of small initiatives that show "love" to the city through creative industries, education, innovation, infrastructure and sustainable development;

• An opportunity for corporations and brands that want to belong in a city in the long run, and build a relationship with their citizens.

We thus build partnerships with brands to create specific value-driven initiatives and campaigns showing love and care to the city and its inhabitants. We show the brands themselves, and increase their recognition for the right reasons, but we do not show their products as we prioritize the establishment of a genuine relationship with people.

Building media ecosystems under cities

Cities can build their own media ecosystem, independent from traditional media industries, answering their specific needs for smart and sustainable development.

The love people have for the city where they live, whether they have chosen it or lived there all their life, is a powerful source of engagement and action. In many ways, it is the solution for us to reach a more sustainable urban lifestyle.

Thus, cities need driven producers, content and media outlets that create, tell and showcase a new type of inspiring, entertaining and reconnective stories. Cities do need to step in the media world: they have an opportunity to get people’s attention and provide them with a beautiful mirror of their lives.

Empowering urban citizens through media with videos, documentaries and feature-films is one of the rare bottom-up models that can generate the change we need in this world.

The Cities of Love model is the opportunity to gather an ensemble of stakeholders around the development of cities, and to embark them on a strictly positive journey that will shatter the norms of traditional film and media industries.

Our Vision

Each Cities of Love initiative focuses on a city bringing forth the distinctive qualities and character of that location, while illuminating the stories and feeling in us all, bridging the gap between cultures, educating and entertaining at once, and aiming at making these cities better places to live.

Our future lies in cities, and each of them faces specific and serious challenges, ecological and social. Our urban evolution will determine our future as human beings. Creativity has a major card to play and can serve the purpose of eco-city development: we need to create mechanisms that inspire citizens / communities, and empower them to make change. Cities of Love platforms adress today’s challenges with a positive entertaining tone, reaching an audience mainly below 24-year old.

The purpose of Cities of Love is to become a non-denominational, apolitical and impactful network of non-profits serving harmonious human development and creating a ring of unified cities that care about the course of human history / evolution, and that will exchange best practices. We want to build partnerships with cities, communities and sponsors to celebrate urban life through story telling and generate life changing actions in these Cities of Love.

JOIN OUR NETWORK. CELEBRATE YOUR CITY. 

BUILD A MEDIA ECOSYSTEM IN YOUR CITY.