
Chronicle of a Summer (1961)
Paris, summer 1960. Anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch and sociologist and film critic Edgar Morin wander through the crowded streets asking passersby how they cope with life's misfortunes.
Paris, summer 1960. Anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch and sociologist and film critic Edgar Morin wander through the crowded streets asking passersby how they cope with life's misfortunes.
In 1935, German scientists dug for bones; in 1943, they murdered to get them. How the German scientific community supported Nazism, distorted history to legitimize a hideous system and was an accomplice to its unspeakable crimes. The story of the Ahnenerbe, a sinister organization created to rewrite the obscure origins of a nation.
A young woman, who has inherited her grandparents' huge house, a fascinating place full of amazing objects, feels overwhelmed by the weight of memories and her new responsibilities. Fortunately, the former inhabitants of the house soon come to her aid. (An account of the life and work of Fernando Fernán Gómez [1921-2007] and his wife Emma Cohen [1946-2016], two singular artists and fundamental figures of contemporary Spanish culture.)
It's the unforgivable story of the two hundred thousands harkis, the Arabs who fought alongside the French in the bitter Algerian war, from 1954 to 1962. Why did they make that choice? Why were they slaughtered after Algeria's independence? Why were they abandonned by the French government? Some fifty to sixty thousands were saved and transferred in France, often at pitiful conditions. This is for the first time, the story of this tragedy, told in the brilliant style of the authors of "Apocalypse".
During the worst days of World War II, the British government asks the mathematician Alan Turing to unravel the mysteries of the German Enigma encryption machine, an impossible task to accomplish without the invaluable information that Hans-Thilo Schmidt, a disenchanted but greedy German citizen, had been handing over to the French secret services since 1931.
At the close of Jacques Chirac's life, politician Jean-Louis Debré has wished to make a film to celebrate his friend, to tell the story of their friendship and professional understanding, and to make an intimate portrait of the former President of France through the accounts of a few very close friends. Thanks to Jean-Louis Debré's presence, Claude Chirac and some of Jacques Chirac's closest friends, famous or unknown, agreed to talk to the camera, sometimes for the first time, to evoke their untold-before memories and tell about the moments that bonded the two men for a lifetime.
A Danish writer travels to Mexico with the purpose of locating a mysterious Apache tribe that fervently seeks to remain in obscurity.
How in 1959, during the heat of the Cold War, the government of the United States decided to create a secret military base located in the far north of Greenland: Camp Century, almost a real town with roads and houses, a nuclear plant to provide power and silos to house missiles aimed at the Soviet Union.
Today it's a symbol of strength and vitality. 135 years ago, it was a source of controversy. This documentary examines the great problems and ingenious solutions that marked the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. From conception to construction, it traces the bridge's transformation from a spectacular feat of heroic engineering to an honored symbol in American culture.
Berlin, summer 1988: While Michael Jackson and Pink Floyd perform in the West, East Berliners can look forward to Bruce Springsteen, Depeche Mode and James Brown. The documentary reveals how the organizers enforced the concerts with the state authorities. On the anniversary of the fall of the Wall.
This documentary traces the capture of serial killer Guy Georges through the tireless work of two women: a police chief and a victim's mother.
Pierre Clément, student and photographer of René Vauthier, first accompanied him to Tunisia to make a film on the country's independence in 1957. Destiny led him to Algeria and his presence in February 1958 at the Tunisian-Algerian border changed his life. . Forever. He took his camera and photographed the attacks on Sakia Sidi Youssef before committing himself body and soul to the Algerian cause. Shortly after, he directed the film “Algerian Refugees” before being arrested, tortured and imprisoned, while his third film, “The National Liberation Army in Almaki”, was not finished. Abdel Nour Zahzah, a director who commemorates Pierre Clément, the director who risked his life, the brother of the Algerian resistance, who disappeared in 2007.
In 1970, a British film crew set out to make a straightforward literary portrait of James Baldwin set in Paris, insisting on setting aside his political activism. Baldwin bristled at their questions, and the result is a fascinating, confrontational, often uncomfortable butting of heads between the filmmakers and their subject, in which the author visits the Bastille and other Parisian landmarks and reflects on revolution, colonialism, and what it means to be a Black expatriate in Europe.
Deng Xiaoping's economic and political opening in China. Margaret Thatcher's extreme economic measures in the United Kingdom. Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Revolution in Iran. Pope John Paul II's visit to Poland. Saddam Hussein's rise to power in Iraq. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The nuclear accident at the Harrisburg power plant and the birth of ecological activism. The year 1979, the beginning of the future.
A fantastic journey through the world of Renato Casaro, one of the most important illustrators that the world’s film poster industry has ever known.
Lithuania, 1941, during World War II. Hundreds of thousands of texts on Jewish culture, stolen by the Germans, are gathered in Vilnius to be classified, either to be stored or to be destroyed. A group of Jewish scholars and writers, commissioned by the invaders to carry out the sorting operations, but reluctant to collaborate and determined to save their legacy, hide many books in the ghetto where they are confined. This is the epic story of the Paper Brigade.
The legendary British-American actress Olivia de Havilland (1916-2020), who conquered Hollywood in the thirties, challenged the film industry when, in 1943, she took on the all-powerful producer Jack Warner in court, forever changing the ruthless working conditions that restricted the essential rights and freedom of artists.
Hauntology of the Retrodromomania is an essayistic motion picture, a locomotory legwork, a deambulatory non-rural land survey, a casual journeying in a punctual dissertation around the phenomenon of the nostalgic feeling, discoursing on a late capitalistic landscape of social emotions, which are of yore, yet coloured of the postmodern tint of pixelated neo-noir, a socio-philosophical flâneur’s trip in critical theory escorted by the spirits of French post-structuralists. For a Sociology of Nostalgia revisited.