To Pause Things

The story of Queen Elizabeth II in her own words, featuring never-before-seen home movies.

To mark the 30th anniversary of L'Étrange Festival, Gaumont is opening up its archives to offer the best of its most secret, bizarre and crazy images, digitized for the first time. A unique program featuring black magic, surrealistic happenings, world records, the evolution of feminism, wild bets, vanished places, forgotten inventions and other delights.

A student's increasingly intimate line of questioning causes his interview with a local horror host to take a vulnerable turn.

A story of life and death, featuring Lozinski's six-year-old son Tomaszek and elderly people spending time on the benches of a Warsaw park. Riding his scooter, Tomaszek asks the elderly very adult, though basic, questions, which they are happy to answer. The boy's ideas of future and life are confronted with those of men at the end of their lives.

This shows physicist Stephen Hawking's life as he deals with the ALS that renders him immobile and unable to speak without the use of a computer. Hawking's friends, family, classmates, and peers are interviewed not only about his theories but the man himself.

Using found footage, still photographs, animations, and occasional original footage, “The Mist in the Palm Trees” purports to tell the story of Santiago Bergson, writer, physicist, and sometime pornographer who sold arms to the Resistance in France, flirted with the Nazis, collaborated on Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” broadcast and helped build the A-Bomb.

Fame driven Ken Dean becomes the subject of a documentary when he attempts to start a pornography company. Following the failure of the company, Ken uses his father's religious music to start a Christian rock band but finds himself trapped in a gay conversion cult.

Five young Ukrainians discuss life following the Maidan Revolution of 2014. Not all fought in the Russian-Ukrainian war, but it, regardless, shattered their life plans. Representing 'Generation Maidan', they face the question of how to cope with experiences of violence, how to go on. A local theatre director produces Hamlet, wherein they can use Shakespeare’s tragic character as a mirror and face their traumas onstage. For them, 'to be or not to be' is not simply text but an existential dilemma with no clear answer.

A retrospective documentary about the groundbreaking horror series, Friday the 13th, featuring interviews with cast and crew from the twelve films spanning 3 decades.

Brief scenes of death related material: mortuaries, accidents and police work are filmed by TV crews and home video cameras. Some of it is most likely fake, some not as much.

The third installment of the infamous "is it real or fake?" mondo series sets its sights primarily on serial killers, with lengthy reenactments of police investigations of bodies being found in dumpsters, and a staged courtroom sequence.

Follows the same pattern of the other Faces of Death movies. In this one we see many staged and not so staged looking deaths ranging from bungee jumping accidents and magic tricks gone bad.

A paralysingly beautiful documentary with a global vision—an odyssey through landscape and time—that attempts to capture the essence of life.

Shot by a reported “1,001 Syrians” according to the filmmakers, SILVERED WATER, SYRIA SELF-PORTRAIT impressionistically documents the destruction and atrocities of the civil war through a combination of eye-witness accounts shot on mobile phones and posted to the internet, and footage shot by Bedirxan during the siege of Homs. Bedirxan, an elementary school teacher in Homs, had contacted Mohammed online to ask him what he would film, if he was there. Mohammed, working in forced exile in Paris, is tormented by feelings of cowardice as he witnesses the horrors from afar, and the self-reflexive film also chronicles how he is haunted in his dreams by a Syrian boy once shot to death for snatching his camera on the street.

A French documentary or, one might say more accurately, a mockumentary, by director William Karel which originally aired on Arte in 2002 with the title Opération Lune. The basic premise for the film is the theory that the television footage from the Apollo 11 Moon landing was faked and actually recorded in a studio by the CIA with help from director Stanley Kubrick.

Paranormal investigators Sam and Colby have hunted ghosts at the world's most iconic haunted locations. Now they set out to investigate a mysterious desert ranch famous for ghosts, UFOs, and terrifying monsters lurking in the dark.

A collection of death scenes, ranging from TV-material to home-made super-8 movies. The common factor is death by some means.

An alien narrates the story of his dying planet, his and his people's visitations to Earth and Earth's self-made demise, while human astronauts in space are attempting to find an alternate planet for surviving humans to live on.

Recently discovered footage reveals the secret history of NASA's first landing on the moon, and using this brand-new evidence, former astronauts and experts challenge everything known about the Apollo missions.

A French documentary on Superman actor Christopher Reeve as told by his French voice dubbing actor, Pierre Arditi.