ARTE Distribution

This series tells world history through a few major dates, revisited through the prism of memory. Driven by the accessible and passionate delivery of historian Patrick Boucheron, history comes to life under our eyes with bold and entertaining graphics.

A date is a snapshot, a flashback which requires crossing disciplines such as history, art, archeology and literature for a vibrant and sensitive reading of the past. It arouses our childhood curiosity, recalling when we dreamed of a time machine.
The series is conceived to potentially become a key reference in teaching history.

In the Middle Ages, Paris gave birth to the world’s most famous stone edifice: Notre-Dame. 7 centuries have passed since its construction. Watch history come alive thanks to 3D reproduction of the monument. A dramatic tale of ambition, talent, destruction, blood and rebirth. 

We tell the incredible 700 year saga of the builders and Church’s Men who invented modern day architecture in France and throughout Europe. Driven by the quest for perfect harmony, they created one of the most emblematic sacred monuments known today. 3D animation and documentary will come together in a history film to give an accurate representation of this great historical fresco. Indeed, the fictional tale, entirely in animation sequences will be the backbone of the film, around which the documentary scenes will be built to provide specific historic and technical explanations.

Nominee at the Buzzies of World Congress 2020: award for the Best History Program/Content - Long Format

Discover how in 150 years China fell from it’s leader’s position and rebounded to soon become the world’s greatest power.

This historical and geopolitical investigation explains how China reinvented itself to return to its former greatness, thanks to the action of political key figures but also the help of those who remained in the shadows. Combining exceptional archival images, unique animation and the words of international historians, this documentary overturns the West's view of China.

Mafias and Banks: two opposite worlds. They share the same taste for luxury, risk, and easy money yet they despise and fear each other and are both inextricably linked to the government.

For a long time, criminals robbed banks, disemboweled and emptied their safes. It was not until the end of the Second World War that the mafias began to understand all the benefits they could make from banking institutions, and then from finance.

In this series of 3 episodes covering 150 years of economic, political and cultural history, Cédric Tourbe and Romain Huret dissect the capitalist storytelling that has succeeded in perpetuating the American dream – from Rockefeller to the Koch family, or from Carnegie to Bezos. 

Culture, advertising, public relations and above all philanthropy are the weapons of a genuine gospel of wealth, which, despite the inequalities, continues to nourish the American psyche. Until when?  In 2018, the three wealthiest Americans’ estimated worth equals that of about half of the least wealthy Americans together; or 162 million people. Since its inception, the United States has been capitalism's very own Promised Land. But the accumulation of wealth cannot come at the expense of democracy – as the founding fathers, themselves multimillionaires, said. Too many inequalities heighten the risk of chaos. Capital versus democracy: a very American equation.
 
1. The Merchants of the Temple (1870-1945)
2. The Republic of Consumers (1946-1980)
3. Unfettered Wealth (1981-2021) 

This documentary series takes up where fictional adaptations leave off and tells the real-life stories they are based on, using a wealth of archive material to retrace the extraordinary lives of the ordinary people involved.

Everyday folk are all the rage - and they often make excellent fictional characters. Since the 1990s, our interest in true stories has skyrocketed. The shelves of bookshops are lined with them, and they fuel box-office hits. "Based on a true story" has become a favourite advertising hook, with its promise of strong emotions and dramatic events. Over and above its selling power, our fascination with real-life stories says much about the times we live in and our hunger for authenticity. In a world in which traditional moral criteria are becoming blurred, society is desperately searching for something real to hold onto. And people reason that if a story is true, it could easily have happened to them.

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.
 
 

There are few commodities as global as drugs. How this trade influenced relations between states, global financial interests, secret diplomacies, secret special forces and mafias, on all continents over a century in a half.

This series explores the history of drug trafficking from a political perspective and reveals the murky role played by many states which have used the drug trade as an instrument of power. Opium, heroin, cocaine, and designer drugs have sparked wars, financed militias, and brought down states.
 
 
Selected at the Realscreen Awards in the category of non-fiction - archive-based program.

For 70 years, the Red Army was one of the foundations of the USSR, an instrument of fear as well as admiration, a symbol of liberation as well as coercion. This documentary explores its history, combining epic narrative and deconstruction of the myth.

While everyone knows that Trotsky's name is attached to his creation, most of its past is made up of military defeats and failures, contrary to the common idea.
 
 

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.

Through exclusive film archive and written journals, we will reveal one of the lesser known chapters of the end of the 3rd Reich, a story of unbelievable brutality and murder.

In the final months of the Second World War, 700,000 prisoners were evacuated from concentration camps and sent on the roads throughout Europe. Between 250,000 and 300,000 died from exhaustion or were massacred by the guards or even civilians in Austria and Germany.

This film tells for the first time the story of the Katyn massacre seen from both sides: That of the victims and that of the perpetrators. It reveals how this crime, attributed to the Nazis for 50 years, was in fact carried out by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD.

In April 2020, it will be 80 years since the slaughter. The name Katyn has come to embody this large-scale massacre carried out in the greatest secrecy. In a clearing near the city of Smolensk, on the border with Belarus, many of these soldiers, mainly officers, were executed. First blamed on the Nazis, the cover-up endured for five years. It was only on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union that Mikhail Gorbachev was finally forced to acknowledge Stalin’s responsibility in the perpetration of the crime. His successor, Boris Yeltsin, opened the archives that provided the long-awaited evidence.
Eighty years later, through archives and animation, Cédric Tourbe tells the story of the Katyn massacre from the side of the victims, and for the first time, from that of the executioners. This slaughter says much about the workings of the Soviet regime, based on a police force operating in unbelievable secrecy.

Festivals: 
Selection at the Lauriers de l'Audiovisuel 2021