Portrait of Panama Al Brown, a great boxer in the 30's, and its story with France, with a focus on its relationship with Jean Cocteau, surrealist, poet, director, artist.
The documentary gives us a unique insight into the life of a pop star who broke through at ten years old. We follow her around the world and see a side she's never shown before. This is the story of an artist reaching for the very top, but with the knowledge that no matter how much she achieves, it'll never be enough to satisfy her.
Federico Fellini died on October 31st, 1993. Thirty years later, he is still considered as one of the most irreverant moviemaker in the history of cinema. Through a long-previously-unseen interview, directed by Jean-Christophe Rosé in 1981, through extracts of his films and through behind-the-scenes, this documentary draws an intimate portrait of Fellini by himself.
An unflinching and deeply personal journey into the life and work of guitarist Eric Clapton told through his own words and songs.
THE STORY WON’T DIE, from Award-winning filmmaker David Henry Gerson, is an inspiring, timely look at a young generation of Syrian artists who use their work to protest and process what is currently the world’s largest and longest ongoing displacement of people since WWII. The film is produced by Sundance Award-winner Odessa Rae (Navalny). Rapper Abu Hajar, together with other creative personalities of the Syrian uprising, a post-Rock musician (Anas Maghrebi), members of the first all-female Syrian rock band (Bahila Hijazi + Lynn Mayya), break-dancer (Bboy Shadow), choreographer (Medhat Aldaabal), and visual artists (Tammam Azzam, Omar Imam + Diala Brisly), use their art to rise in revolution and endure in exile in this new documentary reflecting on a battle for peace, justice and freedom of expression. It is an uplifting and humanizing look at what it means to be a refugee in today’s world and offers inspiring and hopeful vantages on a creative response to the chaos of war.
Sylvie Vartan has had an extraordinary life: a Bulgarian child forced into exile, who became the icon of a youth in the midst of revolution in France. After a career spanning 64 years, with nearly 50 albums recorded and 40 million records sold, she has decided to bow out. During her farewell tour, the singer chose to open up to Augustin Trapenard.
Taking its lead from French artists like Renoir and Monet, the American impressionist movement followed its own path which over a forty-year period reveals as much about America as a nation as it does about its art as a creative power-house. It’s a story closely tied to a love of gardens and a desire to preserve nature in a rapidly urbanizing nation. Travelling to studios, gardens and iconic locations throughout the United States, UK and France, this mesmerising film is a feast for the eyes. The Artist’s Garden: American Impressionism features the sell-out exhibition The Artist’s Garden: American Impressionism and the Garden Movement, 1887–1920 that began at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and ended at the Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, Connecticut.
Madonna's rise to fame from 1978 to 1992, exploring her personal life, controversies, and the challenges she faced during that period.
The life and work of New York artist Jean-Michel Basquiat have been marked by a long quest for identity, by his Haitian and Puerto Rican family origins and by a founding trip to Africa. To portray this major painter of the 20th century, who died in 1988 at only 27 years old, is also to evoke the place of black American artists in the conservative and racist America of the Reagan years.
The film offers exclusive and intimate insights into how and why the classically trained artist risked rejection to revolutionize the traditional Chinese ink art form in Singapore.
The sculptor and painter Agueda Lozano narrates the first contacts with plastic art that she had in her native Ciudad Cuauhtémoc, Chihuahua; her stay in France and how was her arrival in Europe; her return to Mexico, and her participation in important exhibitions and sculpture projects, among which the definitive insertion sculpture that she inaugurated in the Plaza de México in Paris stands out. Likewise, she talks about her works in the Payment in Kind Collection, about the characters that promoted and inspired her in her career, and about her aesthetic proposals and creation techniques.
In rocky Newfoundland, renowned French artist Jean Claude Roy gathers his paints and sets off to face the day. Whether it be freezing snow, violent wind, or pouring rain, he commits vibrant colors to canvas and conquers the day by weaving crooked beauty out of difficulties.
Gauguin’s vivid artworks sell for millions. He was an inspired and committed multi-media artist who worked with the Impressionists and had a tempestuous relationship with Vincent van Gogh. But he was also a competitive and rapacious man who left his wife to bring up five children and used his colonial privilege to travel to Polynesia, where in his 40s he took ‘wives’ between 13 and 15 years old, creating images of them and their world that promoted a fantasy paradise of an unspoilt Eden in the Pacific. Later, he challenged the colonial authorities and the Catholic Church in defence of the indigenous people, dying in the Marquesas Islands in 1903, sick, impoverished and alone.
Mark Rothko, a master of abstract expressionism, created 835 paintings during his five-decade career.
In this portrait film, we meet Inger Christensen in her apartment in Østerbro, Copenhagen, where she tells of her life and work, and reads excerpts from her major works.
2020 marks 100 years since the birth of Federico Fellini, the most prominent Italian director and one of the symbols of the insuperable cinematic heyday of mid-20th century. Fellini had always been a mysterious director, not only in his cryptic symbolism but also in his idiosyncratic, excessive mixture of psychoanalysis, Catholicism and faith in the mysterious. In this documentary, his relationship with the paranormal, luck and fate, alongside the coexistence of organized discourse and transcendence to the imaginary, is examined via friends, collaborators and distinguished fans (Friedkin, Gilliam, Chazelle). A great testimony to why rationalists and ideologists have a hard time with his work, ‘Fellini and the Spirits’ is an appropriate yet unexpected tribute.
Art critic and broadcaster Waldemar Januszczak wrote and directed this examination of a man who was not only a great painter but sculptor, wood carver, musician, print maker, journalist and ceramicist. As well as telling the remarkable story of Gauguin's life, Januszczak also celebrates Gauguin's achievements and examines the various accusations of sexual misconduct, familial neglect and racism that are frequently made against him.
Nine artisans on secluded Gabriola Island reveal the differences between mass manufactured and authentic locally handmade through intimate portraits of their work and lifestyle.
Biographer Sir John Richardson and Picasso’s granddaughter, Diana Widmaier Picasso, are the star witnesses in a documentary that reassesses the artist’s output in the years before his death in 1973. The story is of a creative spirit finding new impetus in response to both death’s approach and the censure of contemporaries and critics. Those who were members of Picasso’s private inner circle – gossip about his lifestyle also helped to fire him back up – put the later work forward as some of his frankest, wittiest and most profound.
Pablo Picasso is one of the greatest artists of all time - and right up until his death in 1973 he was the most prolific of artists. Many films have dealt with these later years - the art, the affairs and the wide circle of friends. But where did this all begin? What made Picasso in the first place? Too long ignored, it is time to look at the early years of Picasso; the upbringing and the learning that led to his extraordinary achievements.