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Tea War: The Adventures of Robert Fortune

In the 19th century, China held the monopoly on tea, which was dear and fashionable in the West, and the British Empire exchanged poppies, produced in its Indian colonies and transformed into opium, for Chinese tea. Inundated by the drugs, China was forced to open up its market, and the British consolidated their commercial dominance. In 1839, the Middle Empire introduced prohibition. The Opium War was declared… Great Britain emerged as the winner, but the warning was heeded: it could no longer depend on Chinese tea. The only alternative possible was to produce its own tea. The East India Company therefore entrusted one man with finding the secrets of the precious beverage. His mission was to develop the first plantations in Britain’s Indian colonies. This latter-day James Bond was called Robert Fortune – a botanist. After overcoming innumerable ordeals in the heart of imperial China, he brought back the plants and techniques that gave rise to Darjeeling tea.

Tea War: The Adventures of Robert Fortune

NR 2016
Hakim's Odyssey

Hakim, a young Syrian nurseryman, sees his life turned upside down when civil war breaks out. Forced to flee, he travels across the Middle East, driven by a single idea: to keep moving forward.In Turkey, he meets Najmeh, a fellow exile. Their love gives birth to Hadi, and with him, the hope of a happier life. Resourceful as ever, Hakim becomes a pastry chef, a tour guide or a taxi driver. But the life of a refugee is precarious, and xenophobia is ever-present. When Najmeh manages to reach France thanks to a visa, it marks yet another trial for Hakim.Determined to reach Europe clandestinely, Hakim sells everything he owns and makes the fateful decision to cross the Mediterranean with his son.

Hakim's Odyssey

NR N/A
The Music of Love: Beethoven's Secret Love

The year is 1817. Minon, a five-year-old girl, leaves her aunt Therese of Brunswick, who has raised her like a mother since her birth, to go and live with her parents, the Count and Countess von Stakelberg. One day, Gabrielle, her housekeeper, who is no longer in her right mind, reveals that her real father is the composer Ludwig van Beethoven. Twenty years later, still intrigued by this confession, Minon decides to unravel the mystery of her origins. She returns to the place of her early childhood, hoping to find the truth with her aunt, who was for years the faithful friend of the great composer.

The Music of Love: Beethoven's Secret Love

7.0 2004
Algeria, Special Weapons Sections

This documentary by director Claire Billet and historian Christophe Lafaye details the massive and systematic use of chemical weapons during the Algerian War. Algerian fighters and civilians, sheltering in caves, were gassed by "special weapons sections" of the French army. The gas identified on military documents is CN2D, whose widespread use forced insurgents to flee "treated" sites, at the risk of dying there. The method is reminiscent of the "enfumades" used by the French expeditionary force during the conquest of Algeria in the 19th century. Between 8,000 and 10,000 such operations are believed to have taken place on Algerian soil between 1956 and 1962. This historical aspect is little known due to the difficulty of accessing archives, many of which are still classified, raising questions about memory, historical truth, and justice.

Algeria, Special Weapons Sections

9.0 2025
1940: Taking over French Cinema

Paris, 1940. German occupation forces create a new film production company, Continental, and put Alfred Greven – producer, cinephile, and opportunistic businessman – in charge. During the occupation, under Joseph Goebbels’s orders, Greven hires the best artists and technicians of French cinema to produce successful, highly entertaining films, which are also strategically devoid of propaganda. Simultaneously, he takes advantage of the confiscation of Jewish property to purchase film theaters, studios and laboratories, in order to control the whole production line. His goal: to create a European Hollywood. Among the thirty feature films thus produced under the auspices of Continental, several are, to this day, considered classics of French cinema.

1940: Taking over French Cinema

9.0 2019
Ministre ou rien

This is the unlikely story of 21 ministers and prime ministers who have crossed or are crossing the french Fifth Republic today. Twenty-one politicians who, from one day to the next, find themselves at the head of a ministry by the grace of a President of the Republic and his Prime Minister. The formation of the government, conflicts of attribution, reshuffles, rumours of appointments, evictions, casting errors: it is all the capricious backstage of the games of power examined here under the angle of confidence and which sheds light on the prestigious but unknown function of minister. An original and instructive political saga on the reality of those who hold or have held this prestigious position.

Ministre ou rien

NR 2014
Picasso, Braque & Cie - The Cubist Revolution

In 1906, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso were 24 and 25 years old. The Butte Montmartre is their Parisian sanctuary where artists in need of recognition meet. Braque and Picasso become friends to the point of never leaving each other. For the moment, their paintings do not interest many people; only Apollinaire, then aged 26, and the young gallery owner Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 22, saw immense potential in them. And in addition to their passion for painting, these four inseparable boys share the same appetite for modernity. Collages, diversions of materials and geometrization of forms: cubism opened the way to abstraction. A revolution initiated by Picasso and Braque, which profoundly changed the course of the history of modern art.

Picasso, Braque & Cie - The Cubist Revolution

8.8 2018