ARTE Distribution

10% of the wealthiest Americans ôwn 80% of the country’s resources. This film dissects the capitalist storytelling that helped perpetuate the American Dream for over 150 years, from Rockefeller 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.

In Laos, farmers and herders sell a buffalo whenever they need to pay medical bills, finance a wedding or compensate for a poor rice harvest. Except that their ruminants are mostly malnourished. Weakened, they are prey to parasites and sometimes decimated by epidemics. An innovating diet could remedy this situation.

Asbestos has been banned for decades in Europe but its effects are still being felt today, and it is still being produced and sold in many countries. Unscrupulous companies are making a profit from it, while people die because they were exposed to the harmful substance. Will we ever be rid of asbestos?

Far from being satisfied with recording the mistakes of the past, this documentary also X-rays our era: the symptoms of a race for profit are more prevalent than ever and scandals are multiplying like the metastases of an unscrupulous capitalism. Asbestos is gaining new markets. In Russia, the largest mine in the world exports 600,000 tons of asbestos every year, while denying the idea of occupational disease for its workers... but not for its managers. In Bangladesh, "little hands" dismantle cargo ships and European supertankers filled with asbestos without any information on the dangers they face. In Latin America, anger is growing against certain European companies, such as the Franco-Belgian-Swiss group Eternit, which continue to export a product that is nevertheless banned on the Old Continent. Gathering the word of experts, scientists, activists or sick people, this investigation with shocking sequences, exposes a staggering truth: despite the deaths, science and evidence, the killer fiber still has a bright future ahead of it.

A new perpective on the Holocaust based on recent research revealing the role of the ghettos in the extermination of the Jewish community. This moving documentary is based on the recent exhumation and translation of diaries unveiling everyday life in the ghettos.

It's believed that there were about 1200 ghettos before and during the Second World War. Unlike the concentration camps, the ghetto created by the Nazis had no single model, nor any central administration. It was the local authorities who decided how to isolate, exploit, terrorize and annihilate the Jewish population. In the first years of their existence, they served as a place for the persecutors to experiment with the slow annihilation of an entire population that suffered terrible living conditions, deliberately created so as to increase the number of deaths among the inhabitants - who were in fact prisoners. These spaces, integral parts of the Holocaust, were reservoirs of labor for the German arms industry or construction work, before becoming, for some, places of massacre perpetrated by the Nazis. This documentary aims to follow the intimate trajectories of the ghettos and their prisoners, recounting the mortifying daily life of the Jewish community of the ghettos.

Two times winner of the Palme d'Or, Ken Loach is one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers. This documentary shows in a punk and rebellious tone how Loach uses cinema as a political tool that allows to advocate for the advent of a more just society, by raising viewers' awareness.

Thanks to an exclusive and exceptional access to all the director's professional and personal archives, this documentary deciphers his work and the Ken Loach method: to make cinema a political weapon thanks to realistic films that move people. Deeply humanist, Ken Loach never stopped fighting against the implementation of neoliberalism at the end of the 70s with Margaret Thatcher coming to power in Great Britain. This apostle of subversion has twice won the prestigious Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival for his films The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) and I, Daniel Blake (2016). Now 86 years old, the tireless Ken Loach enters the production of his new feature film, The Old Oak, scheduled for release in 2023.

This film sketches a very personal and decidedly political portrait of the Iron Lady who left the greatest mark on the UK, alongside Queen Elizabeth II. Archives and interviews are enriched by songs from this period that really help to understand the social atmosphere of that time.

Margaret Thatcher remained in power for eleven years, six months and 24 days. When her death was announced in 2013, spontaneous demonstrations of joy brought together citizens of all ages across England. The Wizard of Oz song Ding! Dong! The Witch is Dead! immediately rose to the top of the charts, embarrassing the BBC. Margaret Thatcher was the embodiment of the childhood nightmare of a world, the new neo-liberal Western world, which was just beginning to change, determined to rid itself of the cumbersome legacy of post-war Keynesianism.

So much mystery around this ancient prosperous Mediteranean civilization: the Etruscans. The recent discovery of an important tomb in Corsica is the opportunity to learn everything about their rise & fall.

It's time to (re)discover the Etruscans!

Since 2004, the island of Curaçao has been home to a dolphin therapy centre for people with physical or mental disabilities. Five dolphins help the patients to regain a zest for life. This is one of the main objectives of this type of therapy; the effectiveness of which is however questioned by the scientific community.

Five-year-old Ella is already on her third visit to the dolphin therapy centre. She has learning difficulties, does not speak, has difficulty concentrating and suffers from myasthenia. This time the dolphin Chabelita and the physiotherapist Merel Schuringa are working with her. As soon as the dolphin approaches, she relaxes. Dolphin therapy is said to help develop behaviours that other children take for granted, such as smiling, talking, being more independent and open to others. Therapists use the animals’ curiosity and liveliness to stimulate, motivate and educate patients. Creating positive emotions in the patients to help them progress seems to be the key to the project, and the therapeutic dolphins have a pivotal role to play.

Host of the 2022 next football World Cup, Qatar is as tiny as it is immensely rich. Torn between Western modernism and Bedouin conservatism, ruled by the iron fist of a royal family, it sits on the planet gas field and is a major geopolitical Middle East player.
 

This World Cup will be a symbol of the success of the “Qatar start-up” created by the House of Thani, a family saga with an almost romantic dimension. With its billions spent on everything, its princes and princesses with glamorous photos worthy of Vanity Fair covers and its palace revolutions, the Al Thani dynasty – which could be described as the “Kennedys of the Middle East” – will have succeeded in three generations in transforming a corner of inhospitable desert into a global capital. This unauthorised portrait of the rulers at the head of the richest country per capita on the planet will contrast the nation’s extremely rapid success story with its darker side: a diplomacy of corruption, worrying investments across the planet, the exploitation of quasi-slaves from Asia; but above all, the financing of the Muslim Brotherhood and multiple armed Islamist groups, some of which are terrorist, throughout the Arab Spring.

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

A unique documentary on chameleons living on the island of Madagascar, the world’s largest chameleon concentration, revealing incredible never-before-seen images and behaviors. Dicsover their incredible abilities such as: sleeping techniques, dancing, camouflage, 340° peripheral vision, catapult tongue, seduction, fluorescence...

If you thought you knew everything about this strange reptile, certainly the most astonishing of all, you were wrong. If you take the time to observe chameleons in the wild and truly understand them, you will soon realize that their armed tongue and their independent and peripheral ocular system, although spectacular, are only a small part of their incredible capabilities. Actually, the chameleon’s ace in the hole is its evolution and its formidable faculties of adaptation...

An international investigation into the hell of factory farming, deciphering the limitless power of multinationals and the law of silence to maintain an institutional and global crime.
 

Factory farming is the cause of unprecedented suffering. How did we get here? Essentially because of a very simple fact: our societies treat animals not as living beings, but as raw materials, as industrial products. The living being has been forgotten, invisibilized, in favor of an industrialization that destroys everything in its path. An investigation on a system that has gone completely mad.