Tattoos: A Scarred History

An exploration of how the once taboo art form has become socially acceptable.

The Man Whose Mind Exploded

In this "beautifully intimate and utterly unique piece of cinema", Toby Amies crosses the line between filmmaker and carer, trying to cope with the strange and hilarious world view of the fragile eccentric, Drako Zarharzar. A love story. Drako Oho Zaraharzar can remember modeling for Salvador Dali and hanging out with The Stones. But he can’t remember yesterday. Following a severe head injury, Drako Zaraharzar suffers from terrible memory loss, he can access memories from before his accident, but can’t imprint new ones. As he puts it, “the recording machine in my head doesn’t work”. Consequently, and as an antidote to depression he chose to live “completely in the now” according to the bizarre mottoes delivered to him whilst in a coma.

700 requins dans la nuit

Gombessa Expedition 4 Laurent Ballesta went to observe a gathering of thousands of groupers during the full moon of June 2014 (Le mystère mérou) in the southern pass of the Polynesian atoll of Fakarava, where he discovered a pack of over seven hundred grey sharks. How can this unprecedented density be explained? Could it be that social behaviors govern this wild horde? During three years of preparation, he and the other divers on his international scientific team tamed their fear by abandoning the defensive reflexes that provoke shark aggression, with the aim of slipping into the heart of the raging pack to study and film it from the inside. Sharks fitted with microchips, receiving antennas, hydrophones, an ark of 32 synchronized cameras...: a whole technological arsenal is mobilized for the project. As the groupers approach for their annual spawning, what battle plan will the sharks deploy?

De Charles de Gaulle à Emmanuel Macron, les gardiens de l'empire

Surf, le feu sacré

The history of surfing is like one long ride in which surfers relay the baton to each other across the years on a single, endless wave. In order to understand how this ancestral Polynesian tradition was able to span the globe and the eras until it became a competitive sport and eventually won a place at the Olympics, we’ll plunge into its history through the exceptional stories of those who allowed it to survive and be reinvented.

La vida loca

Reflects a depressing and hopeless reality by following some of the members of "la dieciocho", the so-called 18th Street gang in a poor San Salvador neighborhood.

Kon-Tiki

"Kon-Tiki" was the name of a wooden raft used by six Scandinavian scientists, led by Thor Heyerdahl, to make a 101-day journey from South America to the Polynesian Islands. The purpose of the expedition was to prove Heyerdal's theory that the Polynesian Islands were populated from the east- specifically Peru- rather than from the west (Asia) as had been the theory for hundreds of years. Heyerdahl made a study of the winds and tides in the Pacific, and by simulating conditions as closely as possible to those he theorized the Peruvians encountered, set out on the voyage.

Oceano

The odyssey of a Tuamutu fisherman who sets out from his atoll-only coral island to procure fertile land in the "distant" archipelagos. Lost in the vast South Pacific, he finds the atoll from which he had departed now doomed from atomic experiments.

Vive La France

Kua and Teriki will soon get married. They live on the distant Tureia island in the French Polynesia, Pacific Ocean and have just been told that something is wrong with their son Maokis heart. It is a consequence of living only 100 km away from the island of Moruroa, where France has tested 193 atom bombs for 30 years. Several of their family members are sick and Moruroa can soon collapse, which can lead to a tsunami likely to drown all of them. Vive La France is a personal and intimate story about harvesting the consequences of the French atomic program.

Le mirage tahitien de Marlon Brando

Marlon Brando is best known for his successful films and two Oscars. But his link with French Polynesia, where the actor lived for nearly thirty years, remains largely unexplored. For Brando, a complex and tortured character, known for being unmanageable on film sets and even sometimes obnoxious, escaped throughout his life to a small hidden island at the end of the world. By settling in Tahiti, Brando thought he could rid himself of his anguish and turpitude. But Polynesia, with its paradise-like landscapes, gentle way of life and distinctive culture, was in reality nothing more than a mirage of an idealised, peaceful existence that the star never managed to achieve.

Modify

Stories of people who regard augmenting their bodies as a way of life, whether for artistic reasons or out of pure vanity.

Fratello mare

The Work completes the "quadrilogy" of South Seas seen over a twenty-year period. This film, tells the choral story of an island that in the short time of a generation loses its identity.

700 requins dans la nuit (Gombessa 4, la genèse)

Originally, in 2014, Laurent Ballesta had just one precise objective: to unravel the mystery of groupers. To understand the issues involved in their collective reproduction. But although focused on the study of groupers, the real surprise came from the sharks. Never before had the team been confronted with such a density of grey reef sharks. The divers took up the challenge of counting them. Methodically, they repeated the operation many times to arrive at the impressive figure of 700 grey reef sharks. Each year, the team returned to the southern pass of Fakarava in French Polynesia. Until 2019, for the fourth expedition, "Gombessa 4" is the synthesis of precise and unique scientific protocols. The mission demonstrated that shark hunts are not anarchic, but rely in part on social organization within the horde, following in the footsteps of the 700 grey sharks in "700 sharks in the night (Gombessa 4, Genesis)".

Matisse voyageur, en quête de lumière

On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Matisse's birth and of the exhibition at the Center Pompidou which will be dedicated to him in 2020, this art documentary brings us back to life of the journeys made by Matisse that influenced his art. And particularly his last trip to Polynesia in 1930 which will bring him to the threshold of contemporary art with the invention of his gouache cut-out papers.

The Tattooist

Rooster Teeth’s Geoff Ramsey explores the subculture of tattoos and takes a crash course from a master tattoo artist.

La folie du tatouage

Moana

Robert J. Flaherty’s follow-up to Nanook of the North shifts from the Arctic to the South Seas, portraying Samoan village life with a painterly eye. Blending ethnographic detail with a romanticized “Gauguin idyll,” the film celebrates daily rituals, communal traditions, and the passage into adulthood, suffused with what Flaherty called “pride of beauty, pride of strength.”

Bora Bora, le laboratoire du futur

Bora Bora is the most popular destination in French Polynesia, certainly because of its lagoon, considered the most beautiful lagoon in the world. In this context, the islet could have sunk under concrete and pollution, and the reef could have been irreparably impacted. However, thanks to the will of a handful of inhabitants including the mayor of the island, Bora Bora is today a model of sustainable development, with water treatment technologies that are 15 years ahead of France, programs to rebuild corals and protect wildlife, educational actions and the rehabilitation of Polynesian traditions such as “rahui” and the establishment of a monitoring network using new technologies. All of this makes the island a veritable open-air laboratory that shows the way for all tropical coastal environments around the world.

Ura, sauver l'oiseau sacré des australes

Stoney Knows How

A visit with a master of the Oldest Art In The World: tattooing. Disabled by arthritis since the age of four, confined to a wheelchair, his growth stunted, Stoney St. Clair joined the circus at 15 as a sword swallower. A year later he took up tattooing, and traveled with circuses and carnivals for fifty years practicing his craft. As we watch him at work, we see the determination which led Stoney to use his crippled hands in an art where mistakes are permanent, and we realize Stoney has overcome his handicap to heal himself and others with the magic of symbols. The film ends with a visit by New Age tattoo master Don Ed Hardy, who receives a permanent souvenir by Old School tattoo master Stoney.