In this paper we propose a query language for retrieving MPEG-7 documents. It is defined as a specialisation of W3C XQuery and well adapted to retrieve audio-visual repositories such as TV news program archives. We describe the need for this query language, the motivation for such an adaptation, and other details of our implementation strategy. Finally we present the TV news querying tool of the COALA (Content Oriented Audiovisual Library Access) project which supports our proposed query language.