The cathedral of Sainte-Marie-Majeure, known to Marseille simply as La Major, stands where the old town once met the sea, on the edge of the Joliette waterfront. Built in the nineteenth century in a Byzantine-Romanesque revival style, banded in green and white stone and crowned with domes, it was conceived on a scale that answered the ambitions of a port then at the height of its trading power. The film reads the building as an argument in stone: an eastern silhouette raised on a Mediterranean shore, at the moment when Marseille understood itself as a gateway between France and the wider world. Beside it survives the Vieille Major, the far older and far smaller Romanesque cathedral it replaced, and the contrast between the two tells its own story of inheritance and ambition. Aerial photography follows the domes against the harbour and the ferry terminals, while interiors bring out polychrome marbles, mosaics and the movement of Mediterranean light across the nave.
