In the domain of multimedia, rapid DVD browsing or multimedia oriented web search require an efficient content-based image and video retrieval system. In this paper, we present our retrieval system of actors in films combining powerful machine learning techniques with “kernels on bags of bags” design. From a film segmented into shots, we extract video-tubes of actor faces and represent these video objects with sets of temporally coherent features. These visual features are then input in the kernel-based SVM retrieval system. Our approach has been tested on retrieving actors in a real film and proved its efficiency.