Het Pad van Sien

In the summer of 1963, François Mitterrand was going through a deep existential crisis. His political career was at a standstill and, after 19 years of marriage, the couple had grown apart. It was at this point that François Mitterrand met the woman who was to give new meaning to his life. Anne Pingeot, aged 19, was to become the companion of a lifetime, a woman who would be with him throughout his rise to power and who would remain by his side until his last breath. For the first time, Anne Pingeot has agreed to allow the fragments of this passionate love story — hundreds of letters and a diary — to be shown on television, before being donated to the National Library.

This award-winning, thrilling story is about a group of discarded kids who revolutionized skateboarding and shaped the attitude and culture of modern day extreme sports. Featuring old skool skating footage, exclusive interviews and a blistering rock soundtrack, DOGTOWN AND Z-BOYS captures the rise of the Zephyr skateboarding team from Venice's Dogtown, a tough "locals only" beach with a legacy of outlaw surfing.

This short film is part of a mixed media artwork of the same name, which also included postcards of Ader crying, sent to friends of his, with the title of the work as a caption. The film was initially ten minutes long, and included Ader rubbing his eyes to produce the tears, but was cut down to three and a half minutes. This shorter version captures Ader at his most anguished. His face is framed closely. There is no introduction or conclusion, no reason given and no relief from the anguish that is presented.

L'Homme qui revient de haut

“Christo: Works in Progress” takes us around the world on a showcase of the artist’s grand environmental installations. With both critique and praise from members of the communities that have hosted Christo and his works, the film takes a deep look into the process and outcome of pieces such as Wrapped Coast, Running Fence, and Wrapped Walkways. While discussing his inspirations and motives, Christo states, “The work of art is not the fabric, steel poles and cable, the work of art is the hills and the ocean, the sky, the gates, the rocks, the people, the light- this is the work of art.” (Christo Vladimirov Javacheff) Though his work may appear to be visually distracting from the landscapes he creates in, Christo’s aim is to bring attention to the land itself and encourage people to take note of their surroundings.

A surprisingly intimate portrait of how the dream of running one’s own business can take on monstrous contours. Managed by the father of one of the singers, over the course of five years the girl band 5Angels had reached the gates of pop fame. But it is a path paved not only with the songs of Michal David, but also with the dogged determination of a man who loses any notion of where his role as manager ends and his role as parent begins. An emotionally moved Karel Gott, five angelic girls, and one overly involved father, thanks to whom the behind-the-scenes pre-Christmas atmosphere melts away just as rapidly as the fat should disappear from the belly. “A singer can’t be a lard bucket!”

Hermitage: The Power of Art

Brazilian singer Maria Bethania has a 40-year singing career. A documentary shows her concerts and famous family.

Narrated by Uncle Jack Charles and seen through the eyes of Indigenous prisoners at Victoria’s Fulham Correctional Centre, this documentary explores how art and culture can empower Australia's First Nations people to transcend their unjust cycles of imprisonment.

Challenging all notions of genre, Semi Colin is a living, breathing art installation. Part performance, part art, part social comment, Colin philosophizes on his life's obsessive work as an erotic artist.

From award-winning director Phil Grabsky comes this fresh new look at arguably the world’s favourite artist – through his own words. Using letters and other private writings I, Claude Monet reveals new insight into the man who not only painted the picture that gave birth to impressionism but who was perhaps the most influential and successful painter of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Despite this, and perhaps because of it, Monet’s life is a gripping tale about a man who, behind his sun-dazzled canvases, suffered from feelings of depression, loneliness, even suicide. Then, as his art developed and his love of gardening led to the glories of his garden at Giverney, his humour, insight and love of life is revealed. Shot on location in Paris, London, Normandy and Venice I, Claude Monet is a cinematic immersion into some of the most loved and iconic scenes in Western Art.

Lissette's favorite aunt Adriana, who lives in Australia, is arrested in 2007 while visiting her family in Chile and accused of having worked for dictator Pinochet's notorious secret police, the DINA, and of having participated in the commission of state crimes. When Adriana denies these accusations, Lissette begins to investigate her story in order to film a documentary about her.

Seemayer Studios presents a new documentary about the American Hotel in downtown Los Angeles and the Arts District that surrounds it. Since 1979, the American Hotel has been the beating heart of a rich community of artists who began moving into the deserted factory buildings between Alameda and the Los Angeles River.

Using over 50 years of archive footage, this film looks back at the life and career of David Hockney.

This ninety-minute film takes audiences on an epic journey across nine countries and over 1,400 years of history. It explores themes such as the Word, Space, Ornament, Color and Water and presents the stories behind many great masterworks of Islamic Art and Architecture. Narrated by Academy Award winning performer Susan Sarandon, this dazzling documentary reveals the variety and diversity of Islamic art. It provides a window into Islamic culture and brings broad insights to the enduring themes that have propelled human history and fueled the rise of world civilization over the centuries

The Victorian era is often cited for its lack of sexuality, but as this documentary reveals, the period's artists created a strong tradition surrounding the classical nude figure, which spread from the fine arts to more common forms of expression. The film explains how 19th-century artists were inspired by ancient Greek and Roman works to highlight the naked form, and how that was reflected in the evolving cultural attitudes toward sex.

Elliott Erwitt has spent his entire adult life taking photographs, of presidents, popes and movie stars, as well as regular people and their pets. His work is iconic in world culture while his life is largely unknown.

To be in Venice and see the architecture of New York, to perceive in a painting by Tintoretto the birth of animated images, to look at the burlesque Cretinetti as the ancestor of montage - so many shifts, displacements, and striking telescopings that Philippe-Alain Michaud proposes in this film dedicated to him. To follow this art historian, curator of the cinema collections at the Centre Pompidou, is to go from the oriental carpet to the film, or from the first fireworks to the cinema. And everywhere the animation of the images - projections of Antony McCall, or of Paul Sharits, Column without end of Brancusi, Pasolini's Accatone - everything moves! Under the tutelage of Aby Warburg, the great art historian of the early twentieth century, precursor of iconology and image comparison, to whom Philippe-Alain Michaud was the first in France to devote an important essay, eleven images are placed on the table to describe the singular journey of this art historian.

What does modern art mean for ordinary visitors to an exhibition?

Director Agnès Varda and photographer/muralist JR journey through rural France and form an unlikely friendship.