Arte Distribution

The amazing and unknown story of how American secret services partnered with their erstwhile Russian adversary, Russia’s main military intelligence organization the GRU; or how climate change forced the two rival blocs to collaborate.

The world’s most powerful intelligence service, the CIA, engaged in the controversial area of climate change and extreme weather events in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. This is the story of their cooperation with their Russian counterparts, the GRU.
A story full of high politics, intelligence and awesome science ensued. Mutual suspicions turned into unexpected friendships and a utopian vision underpinned high efforts to secure a better future for our World.
Their vision transcended diplomatic and ideological lines.

This is the sun, seen from the American Solar Dynamics Observatory’s satellite.
The shooting actually took four whole days. Do you see these arches? 

They rise up to several tens of times the size of the Earth!

Warning: the standard of foreign language teaching in Great Britain is falling dramatically. Conversely, Luxembourg and Latvia are actively developing language learning programmes.

There are warning signals in Great Britain that foreign language teaching is falling dramatically. In Luxembourg, learning three languages is obligatory for all children as soon as they start school. Children learn their first foreign language at the age of 9.

In 2018, for the first time since the end of the Korean War in 1953, Donald Trump, president of the United States and Kim Jong Un, leader of North Korea, met. Supported by South Korean, they pledged to open a new era of peace.

In the fall of 2017, Washington and Pyongyang were still threatening each other with nuclear strikes, to the point of worrying China, Russia, Japan and the rest of the world. What happened then? The “maximum pressure” imposed by the United-States paid out? In this unique film, senior executives from the two Koreas, the United-States, Russia and China tell this story together.

Since the beginning of time, human beings all over the world have made use of plants for healing purposes. These three documentaries, that can be show separately, tell the story of medicinal plants.

Two-thirds of the Earth's population still rely on some form of traditional medicine. In Africa, Asia and Latin America, complex and subtle medical knowledge has survived to this day, handed down via comprehensive oral traditions.
Meanwhile, in the West, with the development of medicinal chemistry and universal access to health care during the first half of the 20th century, traditional healing practices and the use of medicinal plants gradually came to be seen as esoteric pastimes.
After a gap of almost a century, the West is rediscovering the benefits of plant medicine. As a result of the new recognition that medicine needs to centre around the person as a whole, we are taking another look at this traditional discipline. Plant medicine, which has continued to thrive unabated in the southern hemisphere, is now experiencing a revival in western countries.

Targeted assassinations, bombings, unidentified military attacks are piling up all over the Middle East. Can the "secret war" between Iran and Israel turn into a major regional if not global confrontation?

The two countries are nowadays the two dominant powers in the Middle East. Their conflict is reinforced by the renewed tension between the United States and Iran since President Trump decided to leave the nuclear agreement. Based on unprecedented archival research, access to high profile players in Israel, Iran, Lebanon and the US, the film looks back over the forty years that followed the Islamic revolution in Iran, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the Civil war in Syria, to offer relevant keys to understanding the new Middle East.

Following a line of enquiry, these documentaries enable us to understand the pandemic - its origin, its mode of propagation, its fatal consequences and the ways in which we can protect ourselves from it.

A catastrophe is coming. And yet the whole world, its people and leaders, are carrying on as if nothing has happened. We are looking away, closing our ears, not wanting to hear the prophets of doom.
Bird flu, however, is a very real threat, forecast by the least worried of scientists to arrive in the next twenty years, and possibly well before then. The estimated figures total 20 million deaths throughout the world. Suddenly these figures remind us of ancient plagues which we thought had died out.
Despite his great knowledge, man is still just as vulnerable in the face of illness. And even the most sophisticated of States does not possess sufficient drug stocks to guarantee the survival of its citizens.

This film, consisting entirely of archives, recounts the daily lives of both German civilians and soldiers during the six years of WW2, from its start in September 1939 up to the months following the German surrender. A plunge into the private lives of a people on the path to self-destruction.

April 1945. The allied bombings had reduced Germany to ruins. The American and Soviet forces were concentrating on Berlin. Yet even when everything was already clearly lost, the Germans continued to fight for the Nazi regime to the bitter end. However, when the Second World War exploded six years earlier, the idea of war was deeply unpopular amongst the German population.
How can such a tremendous shift in public opinion be explained ? What did the Germans believe they were fighting for ? Were they aware that they were leading a genocidal war? Why did the German people continue to fight to the death, despite the bombings, hardships and deprivation, convinced that they were fighting for their survival ?
Based on The German War. A Nation Under Arms, 1939-45 - the innovative work by the historian Nicholas Stargardt drawn from a Herculean research effort - this film, consisting entirely of archives, will recount the daily lives of both German civilians and soldiers during the six years of the Second World War, from its start in September 1939 up to the months following the German surrender.
Constructed from the letters, diaries and eyewitness accounts of Germans from all walks of life, the film plunges us into the lives of the men and women who lived through the tornado born of their own violence. Soldiers writing to their fiancees or their families, World War I veterans, members of Hitler Youth, persecuted Jews, anti-Nazis, priests and pastors, journalists, writers... The words they left behind reveal the personal thoughts of a people at war, raising the curtain on the mechanics of the Nazi regime.
 
This is a direct dive into the tsunami of World War II, when Nazism pushed its mortal logic to the extreme end.

For two months, in November and December 2008, an Israeli team, in Sdertor, and a Palestianian team in Gaza documented the daily life of the women, children and men of the two cities.

The two cities are just two kilometres apart, which is very close, but they are separated by a frontier that is difficult to cross, both physically and mentally.

Initially broadcast on the gaza-sderot.arte.tv web site as daily 2-minute chronicles, the project has now become the subject of a documentary that portrays lives devastated by the conflict.
The inhabitants of Gaza suffered from the effects of the siege, from fuel and drug shortages, while the inhabitants of Sderot were traumatised by the threats of random strikes from Qassam rockets.

The chronicles showed the bitterness of daily life, but they were also chronicles of hope, of humour, of resistance to the unbearable. At the end of December 2008, once again war tore the region apart. Images of war seemed to dominate. But for those who saw them, no one can forget the pre-war chronicles of Gaza-Sderot.

2009 : Selected for INPUT 2009 in the " TV Media/ Tomorrow, Today " session; Special Mention by the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT); Special Mention by the International Commitee of the Red Cross at Monte-Carlo TV Festival (Monaco), Best Original Online Program at NextMedia/Banff Festival (Canada); Special Jury Award at EBS International Documentary Festival (Corée).

Following the Korean War between North and South, South Korea was considered to be the world’s third poorest country. In the space of 50 years, it has become one of the most prosperous nations of all. 

How did this miracle happen when the country is still at war, and the North is bowed down under the weight of a communist dictatorship?
 
A journey through the Korea of yesterday and today, in 5 episodes. 
 

After the success of the first season of THE GREAT GREEK MYTHS, we bring you the next chapter! An adaptation of Homer's Iliad. An epic poem which recounts the Trojan War.
 
 

The Greeks cross the sea to lay siege to Troy and reclaim the beautiful Helen, abducted from her husband King Menelaus of Sparta by Prince Paris of Troy. After a ten-year siege of the city walls of Troy, the war turns in the Greeks favour thanks to the heroics of the famous Achilles. But were these mortals really the heroes of this war or were they merely pawns in the hands of the Gods?
Following on from the first season, each episode alternates scenes of original animation created in 3D and a rich iconography chosen from the whole of art history, from Antiquity to the Modern era.

The working class has played an essential part of European countries’ history – through revolutions, wars and social progress.  In 4 episodes of a spectacular tale, this show reminds us of what our societies owe to the workers’ movements and its struggles.
 

The story begins in the 18th century. But their fight carries on today. Much of our current democracies’ institutions and values flow from older working class demands: universal suffrage or social solidarity are some of its most telling examples. Our culture – the way we dress, the songs we listen to, the movies we watch and the mass-media themselves – heavily relies on the workers’ erstwhile popular culture. Finally, all across Asia, Africa and Latin America, millions of women and men experience lives similar to the 18th and 19th centuries’ European working class. We will bring out the present’s ever looming shadow by constantly flowing back and forth between history and current situations. Those contemporary testimonies and photographs will help us gather the threads of memory between yesterday and nowadays together again.