ARTE Distribution

Discover the final episode of the world-famous series on Paris Opera Ballet students!

BUDDING STARS
Season 1 - 7x26' 
The 300-year old Paris Opera Ballet School is today a mythical place with an international reputation. In September 2011, it was home to 130 pupils, aged from 8 to 18, all driven by the same desire – to dance one day at the Paris Opera.


BUDDING STARS, FIVE YEARS LATER
Saison 2 - 5x26' 
Experience the Paris Ballet School’s young dancers’ extraordinary lives. The youngest are now trying out for the corps de ballet in which only a lucky few have been inducted. But did the rest continue their career? Find out where they are five years later.
 
BUDDING STARS: COMING OF AGE​
Season 3 - 60' 
Today, those students, we followed for 10 years in the series, are now approaching their 25th birthday and will enter the prime of their careers. It's time to discover the ultimate episode, the conclusion to an incredible dance series!
 
It is also the occasion to discover our catalogue presenting our best documentaries on DANCE! 

Their dream: to become a “danseur étoile” one day. Today, those students we followed in the series, are now approaching their 25th birthday and will enter the prime of their careers.

Ten years ago, the Paris Ballet Opera School began filming the series “Budding Stars.” Five years ago, a second season focuses on the future of these young dancers. The third opus continues the story of a group of dancers who grew up together since dance school, singular and representative enough for each spectator to find themselves in the questionings and emotions they go through. Dancers who embody an aspiration that animates all of us throughout our existence : to give meaning to our lives.

From Cape Town to Casablanca, from Goma to Algiers, the African breakdance scene has imposed itself internationally and the discipline is preparing to make its entry into the Olympic Games. 

From the South Africans’ smashing entry on the Battle of the Year stage in 1997, to the crowning of Moroccan Lil Zoo at the 2018 World Championship, breakdancing has continued to grow in Africa. His Bboys & Bgirls reveal the mechanisms, styles and multiple influences that inspired them. Through their stories, several generations of dancers’ struggles and aspirations take shape.

This documentary - the first in French language - to be completely dedicated to Nijinski - proposes to reflect both the bright side of this clausing-star, and the obscure aspect of his madness.

On the 8th of April 1950, he who the world has named "The God of Dance" died. For six years the star of Nijinski burnt beyond the legend : what do we know of his life, his mysticism, his relations with Diaghilev and Romola (his wife) who were the most fundamental characters in his life ?

2001 : Prix du Documentaire Historique au Festival International Du Film D'art Et Pédagogique (FIFAP). 2000 : Mention Spéciale Du Jury au Dance Screen Monte Carlo.

This film is structured around nine tableaux, which build up a detailed picture of Scozzi's personality, interweaving form and content to convey her inner and outer worlds, the things which fascinate her and the agonies she goes through, as accurately as possible, providing a lively, humorous picture of a composite creative artist.

Trained as a dancer, an actress, a photographer and a mime artist, Laura Scozzi now creates performances she herself calls "theatrical dance".
She founded her own dance company Opinioni in Movimento in 1991, and went on to choreograph several acclaimed creations for it. Coline Serreau and Laurent Pelly chose her to stage several of their recent works, and she has also worked on cinema shorts and feature films.
This film is structured around nine tableaux, which build up a detailed picture of Scozzi's personality, interweaving form and content to convey her inner and outer worlds, the things which fascinate her and the agonies she goes through, as accurately as possible, providing a lively, humorous picture of a composite creative artist.

A few years after his death, this documentary looks at the extraordinary career of Merce Cunningham, the great American choreographer, and the battle for the preservation of his heritage.

How to ensure that his work lives on despite his death and the break-up of his dance company? Lawyers, trustees, dancers, musicians, archivists and dance teachers join forces and take up the challenge of implementing the CUNNINGHAM LEGACY PLAN, elaborated by the choreographer himself before his death.

He is 35, he is from Sevilla, his parents were Flamenco dancers, and he dreamt of becoming a football player. Instead he became a pure dancer and an amazing choreographer.

Israel Galvan stuns, enhances, leaves you overwhelmed. This documentary film gives place to his words, his body, his gestures, his models, his partners and his discoveries. A journey through the invention of an alphabet of the body. A perfectly new alphabet though perfectly recognizable.

In the Seventies, France discovered a generation of new American choreographers mostly from New York. Among these artists, Lucinda Childs was one of the dominant figures.

Their style and working methods were to upset the artistic and choreographic scene of the time. A new avant-garde had arrived that closely combined dance, music and graphic art.
Lucinda Childs first studied contemporary dance with Merce Cunningham. She created the so-called "Judson Church" movement together with other young choreographers such as Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Trisha Brown, David Gordon and Robert Morris. This movement continued officially until 1968 but still influences choreographic creation now more than ever.
Lucinda Childs began creating for the stage from 1973. She has received a number of commissions from major ballet companies since 1981. These include the Paris Opéra Ballet, the Pacific Northwest Ballet, the Berlin Opera Ballet, the Rambert Dance Company, Bayerisches Staatsballett, the Ballets of Monte Carlo, the Ballet of the German Opera on the Rhine, and the White Oak Dance Project.
In 2002, Childs was invited to choreograph Gluck's opera "Orphée et Eurydice" and then Benjamin Britten's "Chalcony" for Baryshnikov. Finally she put "Dance" on again which was originally created in 1979, for the Ballet of the German Opera on the Rhine.
The documentary explores the exceptional personality of Lucinda Childs and puts her career into perspective with her own comments added on.

For this documentary, we go to Grenoble, Gallotta's home town, where he founded his dance company. He guides us through his favourite places, talking passionately about his work in careful sentences and voluble, expressive body language.

For this documentary, we go to Grenoble, Gallotta's home town, where he founded his dance company. In his rehearsal studio, in the outbuilding where he made a film, at the crossroads, on the hills and promontories overlooking the city, in the woods of his childhood, he guides us through his favourite places, talking passionately about his work in careful sentences and voluble, expressive body language. The film cuts back and forth between the interview and the dancers in rehearsal, gradually demonstrating the principles which underpin his work - broken rhythms, minimalist sketched-in movements, sobriety, improvisation, literature and the importance of words, total assimilation of movement into the body and between dancers, desire, play and transmission.
The pieces illustrated in the film are Mamame and Presque Don Quichotte.

Guillaume just became the first Black star dancer in the history of the Paris Opera, and France. Sulivan, a double bass player from Martinique, is the first and only Black woman to have been selected to join the prestigious Opera Academy. Each in their own way, they are determined to fully embrace their black identity and denounce the discrimination and archaisms of the institution.

Guillaume now wants to own his role model status  while proving that he is not the company's diversity alibi. In 10 months, Sulivan will have to leave the academy. In the meantime, she has to find her place in a very conservative environment, where people assume she's a jazz musician and where she got used to arriving early so as not to be blamed for the supposed indolence of West Indians. Her goal: to prove that she is talented enough to join the Paris Opera orchestra. Two young artists, symbols of a change of era, during this very special opera season for them, each with their own share of uncertainties and questions, fears, disappointments and joys, failures and successes.

We invite you behind the closed doors of the famous Opéra Garnier after the 2020 lockdown, when ballet dancers were rehearsing without an audience, until the reopening in June 2021.

Jewel from the Paris Opera repertoire, La Bayadère is a mega-production with flamboyant sets and costumes that brings together on stage nearly 90 dancers of the company. Considered, along with Swan Lake, as one of Rudolf Nureyev's masterpieces, it is also one of the most technical and difficult ballets ever. An unmatched challenge for the dancers after long weeks of interruption and which testifies to the vital energy of dance.

Audience Award at the FIPADOC AWARDS 2022

It was during the last hours of apartheid, in the townships of Cape Town, that breakdance emerged in Africa, thanks to Emil and Tanswell Jansen. 

Claiming the heritage of Afrika Bambaataa’s Zulu Nation, the two brothers created the group Black Noise, the hip-hop standard-bearer of the new South African youth of the Mandela era.