The daily life of Petra, Virginie, and Estelle, three stuntwomen, from the dangerous film sets, where they face all kinds of deadly dangers, to the safety of their homes.
Social & External
Self
Besieged by cancer and nearing the end, the genius Argentine-Brazilian filmmaker Héctor Babenco (1946-2016) asks Bárbara Paz, his wife, for one last wish: to be the protagonist of his own death.
An account of the life and work of Russian filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky (1932-86) in his own words: his memories, his vision of art and his reflections on the fate of the artist and the meaning of human existence; through extremely rare audio recordings that allow a complete understanding of his inner life and the mysterious world existing behind his complex cinematic imagery.
In 1948, French singer Charles Aznavour (1924-2018) receives a Paillard Bolex, his first camera. Until 1982, he will shoot hours of footage, his filmed diary. Wherever he goes, he carries his camera with him. He films his life and lives as he films: places, moments, friends, loves, misfortunes.
Film journalist and critic Rüdiger Suchsland examines German cinema from 1933, when the Nazis came into power, until 1945, when the Third Reich collapsed. (A sequel to From Caligari to Hitler, 2015.)
A group of people are standing along the platform of a railway station in La Ciotat, waiting for a train. One is seen coming, at some distance, and eventually stops at the platform. Doors of the railway-cars open and attendants help passengers off and on. Popular legend has it that, when this film was shown, the first-night audience fled the café in terror, fearing being run over by the "approaching" train. This legend has since been identified as promotional embellishment, though there is evidence to suggest that people were astounded at the capabilities of the Lumières' cinématographe.
In the late sixties, Spanish cinema began to produce a huge amount of horror genre films: international markets were opened, the production was continuous, a small star-system was created, as well as a solid group of specialized directors. Although foreign trends were imitated, Spanish horror offered a particular approach to sex, blood and violence. It was an extremely unusual artistic movement in Franco's Spain.
As artificial intelligence becomes ever more sophisticated, the film industry is split between enthusiasm at what the technology can achieve and concern over the future for human workers in the industry. Will actors and actresses be replaced by machines? An overview on the coming wave of AI in cinema.
Two real-life daredevils test the limits of their love and trust by illegally scaling one of the world's tallest buildings to perform an acrobatic stunt.
With being thrown off buildings an occupational hazard, professional stuntwomen Jeannie Epper and Zoë Bell (the alter egos of Wonder Woman and Xena, respectively) would seem well-equipped for any challenges Hollywood might dish out. But finding roles -- and respect -- in a male-dominated field can prove more harrowing than dodging punches.
In the early nineties, before the massive gentrification of many of New York's then slums, several young people from very disparate backgrounds left their broken homes and ventured onto the brutal streets of the city. United by their love of skateboarding, they formed a family and built a unique lifestyle that eventually inspired Kids, a groundbreaking and outrageous film directed by photographer Larry Clark and released in 1995.
A tribute to a fascinating film shot by Alfred Hitchcock in 1958, starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, and to the city of San Francisco, California, where the magic was created; but also a challenge: how to pay homage to a masterpiece without using its footage; how to do it simply by gathering images from various sources, all of them haunted by the curse of a mysterious green fog that seems to cause irrepressible vertigo…
Through outrageous, never-before-seen footage, witness the making of the Jackass crew's last go at wild stunts.
Japan, 1954. A legend emerges from the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, devastated by atomic bombs in 1945. The creature's name is Godzilla. The film that tells its story is the first of kaiju eiga, the giant monster movies.
The chronicle of the mind-blowing journey that was Hollywood during the seventies; the true and gripping story of the last golden age of American cinema, an exalted celebration of creativity and experimentation; but also of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll: a turbulent and dark tale of ambition, envy, betrayal, hatred and self-destruction.
Tucumán, Argentina, 1965. Three years before George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead was released, director Ofelio Linares Montt shot Zombies in the Sugar Cane Field, which turned out to be both a horror film and a political statement. It was a success in the US, but could not be shown in Argentina due to Juan Carlos Onganía's dictatorship, and was eventually lost. Writer and researcher Luciano Saracino embarks on the search for the origins of this cursed work.
Ridley Scott's cult film Blade Runner, based on a novel by Philip K. Dick and released in 1982, is one of the most influential science fiction films ever made. Its depiction of Los Angeles in the year 2019 is oppressively prophetic: climate catastrophe, increasing public surveillance, powerful monopolistic corporations, highly evolved artificial intelligence; a fantastic vision of the future world that has become a frightening reality.
Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Iceland, July 9, 2016. The surprising discovery of a canister —containing four reels of The Village Detective (Деревенский детектив), a 1969 Soviet film—, caught in the nets of an Icelandic trawler, is the first step in a fascinating journey through the artistic life of film and stage actor Mikhail Ivanovich Zharov (1899-1981), icon and star of an entire era of Russian cinema.
France, 1974. The erotic film Emmanuelle, directed by Just Jaeckin, breaks all records for cinema attendance: the story of the creation of a sensual epic that marked a turning point in the struggle for sexual emancipation.
The extraordinary life of Orson Welles (1915-85), an enigma of Hollywood, an irreducible independent creator: a musical prodigy, an excellent painter, a master of theater and radio, a modern Shakespeare, a magician who was always searching for a new trick to surprise his audience, a romantic and legendary figure who lived only for cinema.
In the summer of 1975, the young director Steven Spielberg set new standards for cinema worldwide with an oversized shark bite, a plastic shark fin and an unmistakable two-note main theme composed by John Williams. With the horror from the deep, a man-eating, gigantic great white shark, the film of the same name became a similarly traumatic reference as Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho": it triggered lasting primal fears across generations. On the beaches of the world, there was clearly a "before" and an "after". Steven Spielberg, who was only 28 at the time, not only set new standards for the thriller genre, but also hid his biting criticism of US capitalism in the 1970s behind it.
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