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Paris, France, December 1897. The young playwright Edmond Rostand feels like a failure. Inspiration has abandoned him. Married and father of two children, desperate and penniless, he persuades the great actor Constant Coquelin to perform the main role in his new play. But there is a problem: Coquelin wants to premiere it at Christmas and Edmond has not written a single word.

Barents Sea, August 12th, 2000. During a Russian naval exercise, and after suffering a serious accident, the K-141 Kursk submarine sinks with 118 crew members on board. While the few sailors who are still alive barely manage to survive, their families push for accurate information and a British officer struggles to obtain from the Russian government a permit to attempt a rescue before it is late. But general incompetence are against all their efforts.

At just 19 years old, in 1942, Anne Beaumanoir had already experienced so much: involved in the clandestine communist youth movement, she had begun medical studies, secretly distributed parcels, saved Jewish children, changed her identity, lost her first love, and narrowly escaped death several times. Twelve years later, as a courier for the FLN (National Liberation Front), she was sentenced by France to 10 years in prison for terrorism, but fled to Algeria where she became the principal advisor to the Minister of Health under Ben Bella. Until the military coup, she went to Switzerland where she would head the neurophysiology and epileptology division of the Geneva University Hospital for 26 years. Through the eyes of Annette, witnesses, and rediscovered friends, this film recounts Algeria, France and its litany of buried tragedies, racism, and the fight for freedom and independence. Annette ultimately instills in us a necessary and difficult-to-define virtue: courage.

France, 1809. Captain Neuville is called to the front, leaving his future bride heartbroken. Her sister decides to write letters on his behalf to cheer her up.

In the early 20th century, Lazar -a taciturn woodsman- asks the disenchanted portraitist Arkadi to immortalize his child. The execution of this portrait will unsettle both men while revealing their inner fears and change their outlook on life.

A chronicle of the unconditional love between a mother and her daughter, from 1958 to the present day, which is endangered by an unsteady and manipulative father.

Long live the strike! Lucie Baud, one of the pioneers of the women's movement, went with creativity, fighting spirit and the power of singing against the weapons of male-dominated capitalist society in nineteenth-century France. The film, based on true events, describes the ambitious fight of a silk moth. She stood up for the rights of the female working class to end maltreatment and oppression once and for all. For the revolution in women's rights, she even put her family back and fought to the end for their beliefs.

In 1913, an orphaned young woman arrives in Budapest to take up employment as a milliner at the hat store that belonged to her late parents but becomes mired in a search for a brother she had never known of.

„Un peuple et son roi" crosses the destinies of the men and women of the population, and those of historical figures. Their meeting place is the newly founded National Assembly. At the heart of the story lie the fate of the king and the birth of the French Republic.

To the east of the Arabian desert, an ancient culture developed; and it attainted the sophistication of its civilized neighbours in Mesopotamia & Iran. The extreme aridity of the spot, combined with the strictness of religious prohibitions, discouraged archaeologists for a long period of time. Only recently, a group of French scientists initiated a large-span excavation. Their aim is to comprehend how this society succeeded to prosper, despite a natural environment so hostile to any conditions of life. The answer seems to be the refinement of a revolutionary, water management technique. Yet beyond such technical prowess, this documentary provides a unique look to discover a unique way of life; but also the pre-Islamic religious beliefs of this milieu.

In 1914, with Italy on the cusp of joining World War I, a group of foreign artists establishes a commune on the rural island of Capri, catching the attention of young Lucia, a local illiterate shepherdess who soon falls under their spell.

The story of the adventures, in the twilight of the eighteenth century, of a singular couple formed by a little orphan with mysterious origins and his young Italian nurse of a similarly uncertain birth. They lead us in their wake, from Rome to Paris, from Lisbon to London, from Parma to Venice. Always followed in the shadows, for obscure reasons, by a suspicious-looking Calabrian and a troubling cardinal, they make us explore the dark intrigues of the Vatican, the pangs of a fatal passion, a gruesome duel, banter at the court of Versailles and the convulsions of the French Revolution.

Titus and Berenice love each other; under the watchful eye of Antiochus, the hopeless lover, they try yet refuse to understand each other. Taking up the “majestic sadness” of these alexandrines, among the greatest verses in the French language, Michael Jarrell amplifies the power of words, making them a vehicle for spaces and identities that, from Rome to Jerusalem, are unceasingly questioned.

Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch: great scientists, national icons, opponents in the service of research. One is a Frenchman and chemist and is already in the second half of his life. He is honored worldwide with numerous prizes for his discovery of the rabies vaccine. The other was a still unknown German country doctor in his 30s, whose discovery of the tuberculosis bacillus was later awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine. From 1881, the two were bitter rivals. Their 20-year rivalry resulted in spectacular progress in the fight against deadly epidemics.

Neandertal man disappeared abruptly 30,000 years ago. Who was that "other" man and what is the most plausible hypothesis leading to his extinction? An investigation using all current knowledge available tries to answer these questions.

During the night of September 5th, 1879, Camille Doncieux, wife of the painter Claude Monet, dies from a womb cancer. In the early hours of the following morning, the painter makes a last portrait of the one who used to be his model, before becoming his wife and the mother of his two children.

A pictureless film in 3D sound full of political, poetic and incendiary echoes around the death and words of Percy Bysshe Shelley, an infamous young poet driven out of his country after kidnapping his future young wife, Mary Shelley, and who was found dead in 1822, at the age of 29, on the shore of Viareggio in Italy. This sound movie uses text, music and sophisticated sound design projected via 27 speakers to conjure powerful images in the listener's mind.

France, 1911. Louise Perreau, struggling financially to raise her son Gaston, gets a new job in Paris that brings her hope for a better life.

Chronicle of the last months of Marie-Antoinette.Accused of having conspired against the new republic,with her children taken away and guillotined husband,in a rigged trial as the result of political negotiations and power struggles.

In 1818, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, a powerful and timelessness novel which eternal theme is nothing other than man's quest for the secret of life. Since then, the Creature became a pop culture icon, overshadowing the novel and Doctor Frankenstein himself.

In Brussels, Belgium, the Royal Museum of Central Africa is undertaking a radical renovation, both physical and ethical, to show with sincerity, crudeness and open-mindedness the reality of the atrocities perpetrated against the inhabitants of the Belgian colonies in Africa, still haunted and traumatized by the ghost of King Leopold II of Belgium, a racist and genocidal tyrant.

Brest, 1950. The war ended five years ago and nothing remains of the city. Massive bombings and intense fighting lasting more than a month turned the city, its docks, its arsenal, into ashes. Thousands of workers will build it up again, brick by brick. But with awful work conditions protests quickly arise and a strike begins. Violent confrontations happen during manifestations. Until one man falls. The next day René Vautier lands at Brest clandestinely to make a movie about the movement.

Between 1917 and 1924, 350 Americans landed in France to participate in the immense reconstruction effort. At their head, Anne Morgan, daughter of the famous banker John P. Morgan and founder of the American Committee for Devastated Regions. To encourage donations in the USA, she commissioned numerous films and photos, admirable testimonies of life at that time. Entirely made up of audiovisual and photographic archives, this documentary plunges us into an embodied and living post-war period as we have rarely seen it.

South Africa, July 11th, 1963. Several members of the African National Congress, an organization declared illegal, are arrested in Rivonia, a country house near Johannesburg. The detainees, along with Nelson Mandela, imprisoned since 1962, are charged with serious crimes for their radical activism against the apartheid regime.

A humorous account of the origins of the nation of Belgium and of the pivotal role of its first king, Léopold.

The 1st Cannes Film Festival was held from September 20 to October 5. 1946. In this documentary, British actress Charlotte Rampling recounts the eventful beginnings of the film festival. In addition, Frédéric Chaudier and Frédéric Zamochnikoff have compiled unpublished contemporary documents from the family archive of Jean Zay, original footage from various eras of the festival, which is now considered the most important and fascinating film festival in the world.

A building lost in the midst of a 5 000 hectare park, that's the equivalent of the surface of Paris, Chambord is the castle of all superlatives. Having required nearly 220,000 tonnes of stone to build, the Chateau de Chambord, in the Loir-et-Cher department, is an architectural gem. 156 metres of facade, it has more than 70 staircases, 282 fireplaces and 426 rooms. The castle commissioned by Francis 1st in the 16th century is also the most mysterious. The majestic monument has its share of mysteries: identity of its architect, influence of the Florentine painter Leonardo da Vinci in its design, location in the middle of marshes in the heart of the forest and even longevity because it has survived through time without being damaged since the beginning of its construction in September 1519.

Thundering across the sky on elegant white wings, the Concorde was an instant legend. But behind the glamour of jet setting at Mach 2 were stunning scientific innovations and political intrigue. Fifteen years after Concorde's final flight, this documentary takes you inside the historic international race to develop the first supersonic airliner. Hear stories from those inside the choreographed effort to design and build Concorde in two countries at once - and the crew members who flew her.

The end of the Franco-Prussian war (1870-71) saw the birth of the panoramas of war, huge circular paintings depicting scenes of war, cruelty and desolation that were contemplated by thousands of spectators, a kind of inmersive static newsreels, a mass media prior to the era of mass media, a virtual reality on canvas.

How can the masses be controlled? Apparently, the American publicist Edward L. Bernays (1891-1995), a pioneer in the field of propaganda and public relations, knew the answer to such a key question. The amazing story of the master of manipulation and the creation of the engineering of consent; a frightening true story about advertising, lies and charlatans.

Inspired on the true events of the Portuguese king Don Pedro (14th Century) which unburied his mistress to make her queen after dead. This film tells the story of Pedro, a man admitted to a psychiatric hospital for traveling by car with the corpse of his beloved, recalling simultaneously three different lives: one from the past, another from nowadays and another one from an distopic future.

Leonardo da Vinci is not just the most famous and most admired of all painters - he is an icon, a superstar. Yet, the man himself remains elusive. Accounts during his lifetime describe a man too handsome, too strong, too perfect to be accurate. But in 2009, the chance discovery in the South of Italy of an ancient portrait with strangely familiar features takes the art world by storm. Could this be an unknown self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci? Controversy erupts among the experts. The implications of such a discovery have far-reaching consequences for our understanding of the work of this great Renaissance master.

On October 4, 2018, France celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Fifth Republic. It is a republic born in the throes of the Algerian War and one which—from the day it was founded by General de Gaulle until the presidency of a very Jupiterian Emmanuel Macron—has been assailed as a “Republican monarchy” by partisans of a more assertive parliamentarian state. By revisiting the struggle of those who dared oppose the new regime — only to suffer a crushing defeat on September 28, 1958, when they were barely able to garner 20% of the vote against the constitutional text — this film shines a powerful new light on the origins of the Fifth Republic and its consequences for the next 60 years. It is a constitutional debate that planted the seeds for a complete upheaval of the French political landscape, on the left in particular, and set the country in motion toward what would be called the Union of the Left.

The convoluted and moving story of Russian writer Vassili Grossman (1905-64) and his novel Life and Fate (1980), a literary masterpiece, a monumental and epic account of life under Stalin's regime of terror, a defiant cry that the KGB tried to suffocate.

A documentary about the French photographer Nadar aka Gaspard-Félix Tournachon

Restoration expert Giancarlo Napoli takes on the important task of saving 86 plaster casts of Pompeii citizens that were created by archaeologist Carlo Fiorelli in the 1860s.

Lithuania, 1941, during World War II. Hundreds of thousands of texts on Jewish culture, stolen by the Germans, are gathered in Vilnius to be classified, either to be stored or to be destroyed. A group of Jewish scholars and writers, commissioned by the invaders to carry out the sorting operations, but reluctant to collaborate and determined to save their legacy, hide many books in the ghetto where they are confined. This is the epic story of the Paper Brigade.

On May 2, 1945, Soviets take control over the Fuhrerbunker. On May 5th, they find bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun buried in the garden near the bunker. Investigation of Hitler's death was kept secret until now.