ARTE Distribution

Nastassja Kinski made a name for herself as an actress playing young, sexualized heroines who struggle with male violence. A woman who associated the job with the terrifying figure of her father and unintendedly became an international star after a few iconic films, only to gradually disappear from the screen, emancipated from the cinema.

Around the beginning of the 1980s, Nastassja Kinski became one of the most famous and sought-after faces in international cinema and photography. Through the lens of Roman Polanski, Wim Wenders, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Lindbergh, Helmut Newton and Richard Avedon, the actress – a “woman-child”, muse and sex symbol – has printed her different faces on the retina of our imagination like acid on the surface of a copper plate. From Tess’ face in her halo of light to Jane’s blond hemming bob in the most famous pink jumper (Paris, Texas), or as Irina, who turned into a panther after making love (Cat People), never has an actress embodied an icon so well. Even more impressively given that, at the top of her fame and after a dazzling ten years career, Nastassja Kinski escaped into the intimate cocoon of family life and disappeared from the screen, remaining forever frozen in an era. Why did this world-famous actress choose to live a private life? What do her roles, her characters and her cinematic choices tell us? Who is Nastassja Kinski, hidden behind the silent icon of the 80s? Through archival footage and extracts from her films, a wide range of photographs, and in her own words drawn from the archives, this film will reinterpret the actress's various performances as a single role: that of a life invented beyond the cinema in a perpetual and modern quest for freedom. A life of her own.