ARTE Distribution

The imaginary universes of fantasy irrigate literature, cinema, video and role-playing games. But what crucible was it forged in? What are its founding works? Illustrator John Howe, the concept artist of the Lord of the Rings series, takes us on a four-part journey to discover the artists who have crafted fantasy.

Over the past twenty years, our views on Fantasy have shifted tremendously. Long reduced to repetitive adventures in comic books or movies with kitschy settings and poor scenarios, Fantasy now faces higher expectations from readers and critics alike, who demand complex heroes, strong female characters, original universes, in tune with more modern issues.
From its distant origins in myths and legends to its emergence into popular culture in the second half of the 20th century, fantasy has gradually taken shape over a history spanning more than a century. From the romantic Germany of the Brothers Grimm to the Texas plains where Robert E. Howard gave birth to the character of Conan, from the socialist utopias of William Morris to the tortured and eccentric mind of HP Lovecraft, John Howe’s travels will be interspersed with animated sequences breathing life into the stories that laid the foundations of the genre. To understand what makes these works so relevant and prevalent today, John Howe will be assisted by renowned experts such as S. T. Joshi, author of a 1200-page biography of Lovecraft, and Patrice Louinet, editor and translator of Robert E. Howard.
 

Dive into the heart of 19th century bustling Paris, following the adventures and destinies of legendary artists such as Hugo, Sand, Berlioz, Balzac, etc. These intrepid young souls shook conventions with their words, and brushes. This one-of-a-kind animated series reveals the deepest secrets of these romantic heroes. Their fights still resonate in today’s world.

Entirely in traditional 2D animation, this series recounts the literary and artistic Paris between 1824 and 1870. The protagonists are non-other than Hugo, Berlioz, Chopin, Delacroix, Courbet, Baudelaire, Balzac or Dumas… Young intrepid artists, eager to awaken society and break the classical shackles by all means in their power, paintbrushes, pens or guns. Their crossed destinies are incredibly romantic and their fights terribly prevailing.

Rosa Bonheur, the animal painter adulated in France in the XIXth century, often forgotten in her country, is nevertheless a major figure of women's emancipation and of the animal cause.

Rosa Bonheur was a major figure of female emancipation: she was the first woman artist to receive the Legion of Honour, from the hands of another woman, the Empress Eugenie, who said on this occasion: “Genius has no sex”. She was also the first woman officially authorized to wear pants; the first to buy property with the fruit of her labor, thanks to the sale of a single painting; she settled in this property with several friends: living between women, sharing their fortunes between them, becoming heirs of each other, they founded a sisterhood that would leave a lasting impression on the French society of the time.

Official selection - 24th Luchon Television Creation Festival

Takeshi Kitano is an international icon. We know the actor, the multi-award-winning filmmaker, but many ignore his split personality: the crazy TV star, the street kid from Tokyo close to the Yakuza, and the political satirist who blasted taboos!

Can we dream of a better guide to introduce us to the cultural history of Japan?

This film offers you the opportunity to learn about the composer's life through his letters, his handwritten notes and the testimonies of great musicians and artists of our time. 

Through writing and music, this film offers an intimate approach to Beethoven's life and work: discover the struggles of a man who never gave up.
Beethoven's correspondence and diaries make for a unique material. It sheds a light on the composer to reveal a side of him that has never been seen before. His temperament, his struggles, what he admired, what he hated, how he lived his life... Most of these precious writings are rarely talked about.

In 30 years of a deeply committed career and 50 roles, Denzel Washington, double-Oscar winner, placed the figure of the Black man in all its complexity at the heart of the American paradoxes: from Black activist, rebel soldier to gangster torn between violence and charity.

Voted best actor of the 21st century by the New York Times a few months ago, Denzel Washington, 65, has risen to the top of American cinema. Actor, director and producer, he has shaken up a "color line" as immutable as it is subtle. Often identified with his characters, he reveals himself to be disconcerting and paradoxical. As if he were holding up a mirror to America in which all of its contradictions and failings were reflected

Brad Pitt is a singular actor in Hollywood’s glamorous world, breaking through his “playboy image” and embodying American cinema’s renewal. Discover the hidden side of the most handsome man in the world.

A humble Midwestern aware of being a smokescreen for the illusions of his time, who has managed to keep control of his image to better serve the most talented directors of our time. To name but a few: David Fincher, Quentin Tarantino, the Coen brothers, Terrence Malick, James Gray and soon Damien Chazelle. Dive into the brain of a complex, brilliant and endearing personality, far from the cliché of a world-famous movie icon.   

Whether you like him or not, whether he arouses admiration, perplexity or laughter, Jean-Claude Van Damme’s life is an incredible and unconventional adventure from Belgium to Hollywood hills.

In 1988, an unknown man named Jean-Claude Van Damme became a worldwide celebrity by getting the lead role in a low-budget martial arts film that should have been released only on DVD, but would make millions of dollars.

This was the beginning of a meteoric rise for the young Belgian who had arrived in Los Angeles six years earlier, without money or contacts but with a stainless determination, which, after many setbacks, would make him one of the best rated action film actors in Hollywood for more than a decade.

Harder would be the fall at the end of the 90s, which drug abuse would accelerate. Mocked for the lunar and surrealistic reflections with which he now spices up his interviews, Jean-Claude would however know salvation in 2008 thanks to his humble and lucid performance in JCVD, a French film telling the story of a former kick-boxing star who has lost everything and finds his roots in Brussels. After which, little by little, Van Damme would climb back up the steps of respect.

Since then, between the United States, Asia and Europe, Jean-Claude Van Damme, unable to stop, has switched between action films, dramas and self-deprecating parodies, making him one of the most lovable figures in cinema.

Over the years, Oscar winner Nicole Kidman, became both a pop culture icon & a complex dramatic actress. Her career is a unique body of work that mirrors her personal life, which is more political than it might seem.

At the top and insatiable for 40 years, Nicole Kidman was able to go beyond her plastic beauty in which we could lock her by constantly renewing her range of characters. She soon began taking more significant roles, working with Gus Van Sant, Jane Campion, and Stanley Kubrick.
Then, she laid down the foundations for an issue she would increasingly explore over more than 30 years and 70 films – the place of women in society.
To tell this story : Nicole Kidman’s own words from a unpublished long interview.

The first movie on Kim Novak, her career, and her emancipation from the Hollywood system, with the exclusive participation of the actress herself. An echo with the #MeToo movement. Discover the unforgettable heroine of Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece Vertigo.  

Kim Novak will forever be remembered for her dual role in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, in which she plays a woman forced to transform into someone else to fulfill a man’s obsession. The actress deeply identified with the role: “It’s exactly what Hollywood wanted to do to me: turn me into someone I was not.” Novak was a rebel inside a star system that broke women’s spirits in order to manufacture screen goddesses, a toxic system she never ceased to speak out against.
 
At the tender age of 20, Novak, groomed to rival Marilyn Monroe by the head of Columbia Pictures, Harry Cohn, finds herself thrown into the limelight. With no acting experience, the young Marilyn Novak who dreamed of becoming a painter undergoes a disconcerting makeover which will transform her into the glamorous bombshell Kim Novak, otherwise known as the Lavender Blonde. Her anxiety on set is compounded by an intimidating studio head, demanding directors, and a misogynist press. 
 
This documentary tells the story of how this box office sensation who worked with some of the greatest directors of the era - Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock - takes on the Hollywood studio system and reclaims her life. 
 

The rise, fall and resurrection of Mel Gibson, one of the most successful but also controversial Hollywood stars. From Mad Max to The Passion of the Christ, from Lethal Weapon to Braveheart… 

Hollywood likes to devour its own children. In ten years, Mel Gibson has gone from hero to zero.
At the very beginning of the 2000s, he was cashing in on record fees of 25 million dollars per film. With two flagship franchises to his credit as an actor, Mad Max and Lethal Weapon, a budding career as a filmmaker acclaimed by audiences and peers alike (the epic Braveheart, his second film, won five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director), an undiminished popularity with all audiences (women, men, children...) and a long and fruitful marriage with his wife Robyn (twenty years together and seven children), Mel Gibson was for two decades one of the most envied Hollywood superstars of his time.
 
All that is now in the past: today, Gibson does not even seem to be part of the American film landscape. The industry has made him the man to kill with lightning speed. And, in fact, he was shot.
 

The portrait of the last cowboy Hollywood legend. Dive into a 65-year career in Hollywood, highlighted iconic films: from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, as well as Million Dollar Baby, Mystic River, and Gran Torino, all the way to Cry Macho in 2021.

It is no small task to cover more than 60 years of cinema history, especially when it is surveyed with such breadth and diversity: TV star, international star, controversial icon, contested director, filmmaker with a capital F, Eastwood has been through it all, experienced it all, and it is first of all this romantic trajectory, this true American pastoral that I want to tell with all the passion I possibly can.