Our story

After a digital launch in 2021 and a first physical edition in 2022, Reims Polar returns from April 1st to 6, 2025 to draw up an international map of the best of film noir. Surrounded by juries and film talents, Reims Polar offers the public an eclectic and demanding program made up of around forty films that question the genre through encounters, masterclasses and moments of dialogue and sharing.

Following Cognac and Beaune, the thriller film festival has established itself as the meeting place for all thriller lovers. Since its creation in 1982, the event has pursued its quest for the best film noir and quickly became associated with big names in cinema such as Claude Chabrol, André Téchiné, Bertrand Tavernier, or Nicolas Winding Refn.

« Every day, every evening, we have an appointment with the thriller, in the dark rooms of the Opéraims, to discover stories, characters whose lives suddenly turn tragic. We discover dozens of films, each representative of this genre as singular as it is universal, and yet each so different in their way of putting the viewer in front of a brutal force, a breathless suspense, a powerful staging. »
– Arnaud Robinet, mayor of Reims

« Was there a more beautiful setting than the city of Reims to crown one of the major and universal genres of the 21st century? Thriller, film noir, mystery, atmosphere… The thriller film does not respect any rules and that’s why we love it and why it is eternal!
From one end of the planet to another, it appears like a perpetual ribbon, tirelessly questioning the depths of the human soul and the transgression of the law: an insurance against death for the Reims Polar Festival! »
– Aude Hesbert, Festival director