L'arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat

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.

Ellis Island, une histoire du rêve Américain

In 1892, Ellis Island, in New York Bay, became the main gateway to the United States for immigrants arriving increasingly from Europe. The story of immigration to the United States from 1892 to 1954, an enthralling polyphonic narrative that embraces both small and great history.

Working Class

Loosely based on Charles Dicken’s book “A Tale of Two Cities”, Working Class tells the tale of underground street artists Mike Giant and Mike Maxwell and their decade long friendship that started with a tattoo. The story is told through the cities they call home by, cutting back and forth between the neighborhoods of San Francisco and San Diego, as the artists talk about their life philosophies and the work they create.

Ελληνική κοινότητα Χαϊδελβέργης

The Greek guest workers -gästarbeiter- in the industrially developed central and northern Europe in the mid 70s.

Στα Τουρκοβούνια

Greek internal migrants in Athens, after the Greek Civil War colonize the tops of the Tourkovounia hills.

Under den gamle Fane

The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)

Co-directed by acclaimed cinematographer Ellen Kuras and subject Thavisouk Phrasavath, this haunting documentary chronicles a refugee family’s epic journey from Laos in the aftermath of the secret war waged by the United States there to New York, where they find themselves fighting a different kind of war on the streets of Brooklyn. Filmed over the course of 23 years, THE BETRAYAL is a visually and emotionally stunning look at the complex ways in which the political shapes the personal.

La Revanche de Bernadette Chirac

Чужая работа

The documentary follows the life of Farroukh, a young Tajik immigrant who lives in Moscow outskirts with his family and does odd jobs in dreams of becoming an actor.

Les yeux dans les Bleus

This documentary follows the French soccer team on their way to victory in the 1998 World Cup in France. Stéphane Meunier spent the whole time filming the players, the coach and some other important characters of this victory, giving us a very intimate and nice view of them, as if we were with them.

Madrepérola

She's Beautiful When She's Angry

A documentary that resurrects the buried history of the outrageous, often brilliant women who founded the modern women's movement from 1966 to 1971.

Madame Soleil, la femme qui était supposée savoir

El otro lado

Deep in Mexico two brothers sit in a plaza discussing a broken fuel pump. In a few days they will leave for work. With their father and some friends they will ride a bus 1,300 miles north and enter the United States by walking through the desert. They call America “El Otro Lado,” the other side.

Mitterrand et la télé

May 10th, 1981. François Mitterrand is elected President of the Republic. The “soviet tanks” supposedly coming upon the Champs-Élysées dressed in red, feared by some, did not march. Serge Moati takes a personal look at this episode, focusing on the relationship the president had with television, that he witnessed and played a role in.

Independent Miss Craigie

Some time after her death, film director Jill Craigie (1911- 99), re-opens an old suitcase, prompting memories of the extraordinary life and loves of this forceful, charismatic woman, whose work has been long neglected. Craigie was one of the first women to direct documentaries. Working outside the British Documentary Movement in the 1940s and early 1950s, her films such as To Be Woman (1951), on equal pay, and Out of Chaos (1944), the first film about artists at work, featuring Henry Moore and Paul Nash, tackled new subjects for the cinema through a unique blend of drama, polemic and humour. Independent Miss Craigie uses the director’s unseen papers, and her films, to reveal her energetic struggles to get her radical projects made and distributed, including her last one, on the Yugoslav conflict, made when she was 83, with her husband, former Labour leader, Michael Foot.

Agustina González. La zapatera que miraba a las estrellas

Mitterrand, président culturel

On the occasion of the fourty years anniversary of François Mitterand's election, a look back to the relationship between the President and artists, from admiration to manipulation.

Un été à la Garoupe

La Garoupe, a beach in Antibes, in 1937. For one summer, the painter and photographer Man Ray films his friends Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar, Paul Eluard and his wife Nusch, as well as Lee Miller. During these few weeks, love, friendship, poetry, photography and painting are still mixed in the carefree and the creativity specific to the artistic movements of the interwar period.

Wetback: The Undocumented Documentary

Filmmaker Arturo Perez Torres follows in the footsteps of two friends traveling on an extraordinary and extremely dangerous journey from Central America to North America. On their journey they encounter gangs and vigilantes as well as border patrol. But these immigrants navigate real-life nightmares with uncanny calm, grace and even humor in their perilous pursuit of the a better life.