ARTE Distribution

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 65 years of 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.
 

Explore the iconic Johnny Depp roles, from Edward Scissorhands to Donnie Brasco and Jack Sparrow. What is behind this intriguing Hollywood star?
 

Perhaps because the actor's life seems straight out of a movie where death, love, drugs, motels, palaces, Marlon Brando and Iggy Pop are all part of the ensemble. These multiple layers, sometimes contradictory, are found in his most iconic interpretations: often poetic and always offbeat anti-heroes: genuine American anomalies.

This documentary series tells the story of intimate and tumultuous love stories in the context of art history. With Amedao Modigliani and Jeanne Hébuterne, Lee Miller and Man Ray or Gerda Taro and Robert Capa.

Love story is an excuse to narrate the lives of artists, their neuroses and narcissism, and to confront them to their alter ego, the other, their double.
Each of the couples of this collection answers the same questions: is love compatible with creation? Can artists reveal themselves through romantic passion? Does love bring a renewed energy to Art?

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 double 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?

First woman to have won the Best Director Oscar, obsessed with the violence that underlies all of her cinematographic work, Kathryn Bigelow's portrait also tells a story of violence in the United States.

"I've always seen violence as political. I see it as a power strategy" Kathryn Bigelow is right. That' s the way it is, death is cinematic.
The atmosphere is getting tense in the United States. Violence is on the rise. Up until now, it was present on screen. Now it seems to be overflowing, invading reality. One filmmaker has seen this phenomenon before others. Whether we like it or not, Hollywood remains our dream machine. And when we take a closer look, the vast majority of the stories that these blockbusters tell us are made of violence: crime, torture, war, rape and murder, which populate these imagination machines.

The reopening of the cold case of Jim Morrison’s death... Was it a heart attack? A CIA plot? An overdose? With exclusive interviews, we discover the truth about the artist’s mysterious death.

Fifty years ago, in Paris, during the night of July 2 to 3, 1971, the body of rock star Jim Morrison was found lifeless in the bathtub of an apartment by his American girlfriend Pamela Courson. The circumstances of his death were mysterious, but it was not made public until a few days later. Heart attack? CIA plot? Overdose? The police having, strangely, not ordered any autopsy, the questions do not end up feeding the myth. Only one thing is certain, that night, Jim Morrison joined 27 Club , these libertarian idols, such as Janis Joplin, Brian Jones or Jimi Hendrix, destroyed by their excesses at the age of twenty-seven years old.

Walk down memory lane with pop icon Damon Albarn, whose career spanned 30 years of British history as the singer of mythic groups Gorillaz and Blur.

He has gone from being Blur’s charismatic frontman to the brains behind Gorillaz, the producer of African artists, and the composer of post-modern opera. With sales of around 35 million records, and 24 albums with six different line-ups, the global success of this man ahead of his time is undeniable. In the UK, he is perhaps more than just a star; he’s a public persona. And his vertiginous career tells an intimate and intense story of his relationship with his home country over the past 25 years. From popstar to anonymous cartoon character, he shifts effortlessly between musical genres, but his style always seems to stay true to his British roots.

Uncover the secret story of the 3-time Oscar winner and actor, Daniel Day Lewis, who decided to quit the industry after intense roles directed by legends such as Scorsese and Spielberg.
 

He is also known as one of the most selective international actors. He has announced his intention to retire from acting after the shooting of Phantom Thread in 2017. Daniel Day-Lewis is a visceral and uncompromising actor: in just 20 films, he never stopped pushing the envelope in his performances. He had more than a sterling work ethic; he poured his blood, sweat and tears in his craft. It was a way for him to escape from a family legacy that had become too heavy to bear. This film harks back to the roots of a family mythology, in which the actor is the last hero, in spite of himself.

A portrait of Ernest Hemingway in love makes us delve into the intimacy of a man infinitely more complex than the image he liked to give. We will discover the author's relationship with each of his 4 wives, which will enable us to re-read his work with a different perspective.

Each of them corresponds to a time and a place during the author's life, allowing us to move from the bohemian Paris of the 1920s to the Florida of the 1930s, then back to Europe during World War II before discovering the Cuba of the 1950s; our story ends in Idaho, America, where Ernest Hemingway chose to kill himself at the age of 61.