ARTE Distribution

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?

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?

A cold case told by those who knew the real Morrison. A documentary between investigation and portrait, enriched with numerous archives, to finally close the Jim Morrison case 50 years after his 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.

This is the portrait of a major pop artist music, and more broadly pop culture of the past 30 years. Author-singer-songwriter of Blur, mastermind behind the Gorillaz phenomenon, producer of African artists, post-modern opera composer, he is considered in the UK as a major public figure.

From Blur, Damon Albarn delivers snapshots of a British company he sees changing. Through him it is the history of England from the 90s to the present day before us.

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.

Consecrated “king of horror” of modern literature, he distinguished himself in other genres such as fantasy, science fiction or detective stories. Several of his works have been adapted for cinema such as Shining by Stanley Kubrick, Dead Zone by David Cronenberg or Misery by Rob Reiner. 

What is Stephen King afraid of? "Well of everything !" says the prolix American novelist. Born in 1947 in Maine, where he still lives, he has established himself since the mid-1970s as the king of fantasy and horror, selling more than 350 million copies of his bestsellers around the world in half a century. Revitalizing the genre by playing on child terrors, his stories, rooted in today's rural America, have inspired a host of accomplished filmmakers, from Brian De Palma (Carrie) to Stanley Kubrick ( The Shining) to John Carpenter (Christine), David Cronenberg (The Dead Zone), George A. Romero (The Dark Half), or Rob Reiner (Misery).
 
Influenced in his youth by the works of Richard Matheson and the classics of fantasy (those of H. P. Lovecraft, Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker), marked as much by the arrest of a serial killer in the 1950s as by the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, this cantor of popular literature sheds light on the genesis of some of his greatest bookstore bestsellers and their adaptation, for television or cinema, through interviews gathered by Julien Dupuy in an enlightening documentary portrait. Between two film extracts, Stephen King confides in it his childhood memories - the figure of the father, who abandoned him and his mother when he was 2 years old -, his impecunious youth in a small town in Maine, his work methods, but also his struggle against his inner demons (alcohol addiction in especially), his defiance of machines, whose revolt he staged in Maximum Overdrive, his only film as a director, or his philanthropic support for libraries to enable the greatest number of people to have access to books.
 
Long despised by literary critics, it has since won several prestigious awards such as the National Book Award.

Anthony Perkin’s face and name remain familiar to a younger 21st century audience, fond of Giallo and slashers. But he has long struggled in the shadow of his most famous character, Norman Bater – the seria killer in Alfred Hitschcock’s masterpiece, “Psycho”.

Officially presented as the most exciting new star since James Dean on the poster of “Friendly Persuasion”, Anthony Perkins has attracted the attention of such prestigious filmmakers as George Cukor, William Wyler, Stanley Kramer, Anthony Mann, Robert Mulligan, Jules Dassin, René Clément, Claude Chabrol, John Huston, Ken Russell, Sidney Lumet and Orson Welles. And the list of his co-stars does not pale in comparison, with names such as Gary Cooper, Brigitte Bardot, Audrey Hepburn, Henry Fonda, Sophia Loren, Gregory Peck, Jane Fonda, Marlene Jobert, Paul Newman and Roger Moore. His filmography ended up being rather impressive for an actor who was so abusively reduced to his only role for Alfred Hitchcock. We also discover that he was an amazing crooner.
His greatest success, “Moonlight Swim”, will be taken up by Elvis Presley. He even directed “Psycho III” – proof of his reconciliation with his favorite bogeyman.

Asimov is considered as the father of science fiction, with over 500 publications to his name. From the 50’s to the 80’s, he had anticipated robots taking over, computers and electronic gadgets invading the household, autonomous vehicles, over population and man’s withdrawal from nature.

Science fiction and anticipation stories have never been as popular as today. It inspires literature, drama series, films, even politics and the military. As the world we live in faces an unprecedented technological acceleration, we are more concerned than ever by the issue of our future.
 
Our film presents the theories of a man who, yesterday, saw what science is bringing to us today.

Is Francis Ford Coppola insatiable? After 26 films, of which at least 3 masterpieces, 5 Oscars and 2 Palmes d’Or at Cannes, and the director still isn’t satisfied: he has yet to make what he calls his big film, Megalopolis.

Francis Ford Coppola. The name alone is enough to evoke the best of American movie-making. But also a unique career that from its beginnings has been under the sign of excess, and of an artist burnt at his apogee by his own ambition.
What is this fire that burns in Coppola?
This is the question around which we already planned to build our film, when, last October – like a sea snake – the official announcement erupted that the director was going back to his oldest and perhaps most impossible project: Megalopolis. That sums up Coppola. The fire still burns in him, this will be our starting point.

A small Sicilian immigrant became in the 1930s a director with dazzling success. He believes in the American dream. No matter what America is in fact inward looking, Capra does not hesitate to twist reality in order to become one with what the country dreams of itself.

A strange echo today...

Who knows Alice Guy? This Frenchwoman was born in 1873 and she is nothing less than the first female director! The one who thought, imagined and felt that cinema would become an art and the best way to tell stories.

With nearly a thousand films, the most abundant career of her time which she was the only one to carry out on both sides of the Atlantic, this pioneer was literally wiped out by film historians during her lifetime. This film paints a fascinating portrait of an ardent and visionary woman, who has never stopped conquering new territories, only to end up with one last dream: to regain her destiny. It finally gives her the floor to deliver her version of history and regain her place in history.
 
"Alice Guy was an exceptional director, with a rare sensitivity, a remarkably poetic eye and a great instinct [...]. She has written, directed and produced over a thousand films. And yet, she was forgotten by the industry she helped create.” Martin Scorsese

Discover the renaissance of the Morozov collection and the fate of the great patrons of this “silver age”, an exceptional period in the history of the arts in Russia.

This film traces the history of one of the most prestigious collections of French impressionist and post-impressionist paintings, acquired by two Russian industrialists before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, then nationalized by Lenin, before being divided between museums in Moscow and Leningrad, and then disappearing for 50 years.