The Audio Festival Connecting Europe with The World, with Bruit Roses' Justine Perez 🇫🇷
Eurowaves #34 Interview
Justine Perez is a podcast writer-producer and director of the Bruits Roses Festival. A journalist by training and an avid listener, she began her radio career in Spain, where she worked on Cadena SER’s morning show. After returning to her hometown of Marseille, she produced audio documentaries for 13 Prods, including Sauce Algérienne (an original Spotify production) and Chroniques du Grand Domaine.
Together with other sound professionals, she co-founded Sonorama, an organization dedicated to promoting new audio narratives and fostering their circulation among young people across the Mediterranean. She coordinates the traveling residency L’Île aux Podcasts (Algeria, Germany, France) and runs the Bruits Roses Festival.
You can connect with Justine on LinkedIn here.
What’s your podcasting origin story?
I’ve always been a passionate audio listener. I started my professional journey in radio journalism in Spain, where I was a producer for the morning show at Cadena SER. I learned a great deal from an incredible training ground, but it was also quite demanding. Producing a daily live show involves preparing large amounts of content at an intense pace. That experience led me to shift toward documentary storytelling. I joined a podcast project in Spain, where I could take the time to develop in-depth narratives and explore more creative forms.
Later, when I moved back to France, I pitched the idea of creating a documentary podcast production branch within an audiovisual company. That’s how I continued building my path in podcasting as an audio writer and producer.
How was Bruit Roses born?
Four years ago, I decided to create a festival in Marseille. I imagined something simple and open, without competition — a space dedicated to listening together to creative audio works, whether from radio or podcasting. I wanted a festival turned outward, contributing to a more inclusive sonic landscape, where listening becomes a collective experience again — a moment to slow down, share stories, and let sound resonate between us. Along the way, key encounters helped shape the festival and give it direction.
Together with the Sonorama collective, we named it Bruits Roses. The name refers to the sound you hear when you place a seashell against your ear — you think you are hearing the sea, but it is actually your own blood resonating. In the same way, Bruits Roses seeks to take the pulse of intimate and collective soundscapes, near and far, in Marseille and across the Mediterranean.
Why was it important for you for Bruit Roses to move beyond a local French scene to a dialogue between Marseille and the Mediterranean?
After six years abroad in Argentina and Spain, I discovered different radio cultures and ways of narrating reality. When I returned to France, I found a vibrant audio scene, but that could sometimes feel a bit inward-looking. For me, listening has always been an ethical stance as much as a professional practice. Working in sound means staying attentive to what is happening elsewhere and remaining open to other narratives, other rhythms, other ways of understanding the world.
Creating a new festival in Marseille naturally called for a Mediterranean scale. The city, like the region, is deeply shaped by orality, circulation, and layered identities. Across the Mediterranean — from local collectives to diaspora voices — audio has become a powerful space for dialogue, especially among younger generations. With Bruits Roses, the aim is to create a resonating chamber for these plural voices, connecting Marseille to a broader Mediterranean conversation.
Given the important issues addressed in the festival, how do you think audio can act as a tool for resistance and memory, as opposed to traditional journalism?
Audio can act as a tool for resistance and memory precisely because it creates intimacy and duration. Unlike traditional journalism, which is often constrained by immediacy, format, and the need for quick information, audio storytelling allows for depth, subjectivity, and emotional resonance. It gives space to voices that are often marginalized and enables people not only to tell stories, but to tell themselves — to reclaim their narratives. At the same time, this approach does not reject journalistic rigor.
Many of the works presented at the festival intertwine the intimate and the political, offering alternative ways of approaching history, memory, and social realities. Through long-form documentaries or deeply personal sonic portraits, audio can preserve lived experiences, transmit silenced memories, and create empathy across borders. By placing listening at the center, it becomes both an archive and an act of resistance — a way of slowing down, bearing witness, and allowing complex stories to exist beyond headlines.
What are your reflections after the first Bruit Roses edition and what are you preparing for this year’s festival?
The first edition of Bruits Roses exceeded our expectations. We brought together a dozen creators from across the Mediterranean alongside Marseille-based sound activists, welcoming nearly a thousand participants in six different places across the city.
Beyond the numbers, what stays with me are the encounters and the impact: people felt inspired to create, to engage collectively, and to discover realities they had never encountered before.
What moved me most was the collective energy — festive and political at once — and the sense that the festival was truly written in the plural, shaped by artists, partners, and audiences alike. We are now preparing the next edition with the ambition to deepen these connections, expand the Mediterranean dialogue, and make the festival even more vibrant and resonant.
Share 2-3 recommendations of your favorite pieces featured in the festival.
La Vénus d’Alger (Seham Boutata, France Culture): This documentary traces the life of an Algerian woman who worked as a nude model at the Beaux Arts in Algiers, connecting her story to the broader history of contemporary Algeria.
Maabar (Anthony Tawil and Cédric Kayem): A documentary podcast exploring lived experiences of Lebanon’s complicated history with a focus on the Civil War.
Soldat Bison (Yasmine Mahjoubi, Les Bonnes Ondes): Yasmine Mahjoubi revisits the memories left behind by her father — his notes, recordings, fragments of history.
Thank you, Justine!